À nous deux, Paris! by Benoît Duteurtre (review)

“une vie étrange, plus que la mienne et la mienne aussi, des histoires, un passé qui n’en sont pas moins vrais” (11). Readers are thus forewarned to pay attention to the equal import of an unknown past and an unexamined present that comprise something larger than the character’s life. Elias Oberer, who speaks the lines quoted above, is the contemporary consciousness readers follow as he learns of his grandmother’s suicide and, more out of duty than affection, makes her funeral arrangements. This over-arching narrative has neo-classical tightness, but the solemn ritual of finality is experienced as mostly undramatic and empty quotidian. Elias is anxious to move from the present of this death—uncomfortably evocative of other deaths—into a future that is vague and directionless (he is a free-lance writer without much conviction and with no evident attachments). What makes his character intriguing is the emotional intelligence he possesses: Elias picks up on language, tone, and gesture, but mostly to avoid connections with others. A tacit woundedness laced with guilt compels him to rebuff others. Interspersed with Elias’s near un-historied story are his forbearers’ stories, of which he seems ignorant. His great-grandfather, Moshe Herschel, was a Polish merchant who survived two occupations to land in Paris; during yet a third occupation, he courageously strategized the release of his wife and daughter (Elias’s grandmother) from the hands of the Milice. This testimonial of selfless love escapes Elias’s knowledge; he only knows of Moshe’s eventual extinction in an unspecified death camp. In the next generation, a Swiss Catholic grandfather is revealed to be a man confused by his own homosexual orientation and caught in a marriage that lasts seventy years. Elias only knows that his grandparents had no intimate life for a full half-century. These histories, were he to know them, would go a long way to helping Elias understand the imperious and passionate nature of his grandmother, her understandable grief, and even the significance of her suicide. It is one of the poignant points of the novel that Elias ignores his own history at the peril of his relationships, of the future family he casually assumes he will have, and even of his own identity. This first novel by Doux is an achievement. The author’s beautifully controlled prose does not indulge in the sensationalism its historic content might suggest nor does it proffer a trite resolution of tribal and self-identities finally reconciled. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Duteurtre, Benoît. À nous deux, Paris! Paris: Fayard, 2012. ISBN 978-2-213-62998-8. Pp. 333. 19 a. This novel relates the exuberance of protagonist Jérôme Demortelle’s rent-free year in the French capital for the supposed purpose of earning a university degree in art history. Thanks to his grandmother whose Paris apartment is empty, Jérôme has twelve months in which to experience social, musical, and sexual awakenings. Set in the year 1980, the novel also revisits the popular Parisian youth spots of the time 270 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 271 like Le Palace, Mother Earth’s, and the Centre Pompidou. For readers of a certain age fortunate to have lived in Paris between 1968 and 1980, À nous deux, Paris! commemorates a nocturnal City of Lights that captivated and disappointed its adoring young inhabitants, both native and foreign. Jérôme endears himself to the reader through his bravado and naiveté. He believes that a well-established musician will ‘discover’ him for what he really is: a pianist with unequalled talents, even though he is only mediocre. He therefore commits himself to frequenting night clubs in the hopes of encountering his future benefactor.The jobs that he lands,however,are far from ideal: for instance, he works as a secretary-accompanist for Mina, an aging, temperamental rock singer struggling to keep her career afloat, and he provides the background music for two Cuban brothers cutting their enormously successful first record, but receives no royalties. Nevertheless, Jérôme is elated for having found work in “le monde du spectacle” (71), his chosen future milieu; and although unpaid for his piano accompaniment...