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Weil, a Parisian Jew, who wrote numerous short stories for Les Archives Israélites in the 1840s mixing realism with “the utopian and sentimental poetics of idealism” (76). The study examines how Ben-Lévy’s fiction navigates between conflicting principles to trace an alternative route where Jewish loyalty to France is not compromised by remaining connected to Judaism, expressed less through religious practice and more via adherence to Jewish ethics and solidarity (110). “A Conservative Renegade: Ben Baruch and Neo-Orthodoxy” offers the counterfoil to the reformist impulse exemplified by Ben-Lévy through the works of Alexandre Créhange writing under the pseudonym Ben-Baruch. Samuels remarks that for Ben-Baruch, “the key to recovering the eternal values of the Jewish tradition and to actualizing them in the present lay in reappropriating ritual and reinterpreting it for modern times” (153). Chapter four entitled “Village Tales: Alexandre Weill and Mosaic Monotheism” offers an insightful critique of Alexandre Weill’s 1857 novel Couronne. Samuels argues that for Weill’s village Jews who seem closer to the core of Judaism and its ethical code, rural life offers an antidote to the problems of modernity and social injustice (172).“Ghetto Fiction: Daniel Stauben, David Schornstein, and the uses of the Jewish Past,” on the other hand, explores the nineteenth-century phenomenon known as “ghetto nostalgia” (199). The investigation uses the lens of both narrative fiction such as Stauben’s Scènes de la vie juive en Alsace, and visual texts like La vie juive, David-Léon Cahun’s compilation of illustrations featuring traditional Jewish quotidian life in Alsace. The concluding chapter draws insightful analogies between Proust and his nineteenth-century progenitors. Samuels observes that “like Ben-Lévy, Proust does not hesitate to mock the graceless social contortions of his Jewish characters as they attempt to fit into gentile society” (250). Inventing the Israelite encompasses a significant contribution to Jewish studies and French literary history. Additionally, Samuels’s easy flowing prose and inviting style make for an enjoyable read. Edgewood College (WI) Sayeeda H. Mamoon STUMP, JORDAN. The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8032-3430-7. Pp. 273. $30. The Other Book is many things—a thorough and sophisticated close reading of Raymond Queneau’s first novel, Le chiendent; a wide-ranging and speculative investigation into the polyvalent nature of textuality; a philosophically rigorous account of the history of literary theory’s engagement with the ontology of narrative ; a survey of the theoretical implications of literary translation; a thoughtful intervention into the recent trend toward ‘genetic criticism’ within literary studies; and an inquiry into the nature of fictional truth. By turns playful and academic, capricious and painstakingly methodical, Stump’s study hides within its pages many of its own titular “other books.” Unwilling to settle down into a single tone or to follow a single argument, it inspires a certain amount of maddening frustration just as much as it consistently impresses because of its originality, wit, creativity, and sheer intellectual exuberance. Stump’s fundamental question throughout his study is: what exactly are we talking about when we talk about a novel? In his case, the novel in question is Queneau’s rambunctious Le chiendent, from 1933, a novel that for all its playfulness asks many serious ontological questions of its own. Stump’s odyssey through the 834 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 “bewilderments of fiction” begins while researching the manuscripts of Queneau’s novel in Belgium, as he stumbles across numerous scenarios and events that never ended up in the final version of the work. Stump describes this experience as one of encountering “a world we think we know and finding it changed, unfamiliar, somewhat unsettling” (2). How, he wonders, can the characters and places known to any reader of Queneau’s novel exist otherwise? Quickly abandoning his initial scholarly task, Stump narrates how this unsettling difference between the novel and its manuscript led him to consider some fundamental questions about reading and the nature of literature as such. How does Le chiendent exist and where does it lie? Stump quickly realizes that these same thorny ontological questions become posed by the existence of...

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