La confusion des peines by Laurence Tardieu (review)

donnant ensuite des concerts en Europe, y compris à Paris en première partie de Johnny Hallyday. On l’entend dans les juke-boxes mais il connaît vite des difficultés. Chandler l’abandonne et son nouveau manager cherche à s’enrichir à ses dépens. Hendrix va du succès au désenchantement. Son ami Brian Jones meurt, la douane canadienne trouve ses sachets d’héroïne, l’un de ses joueurs veut quitter le groupe et la fatigue l’accable. Durant cette vie vagabonde, il s’enfonce dans les drogues, l’alcool et les somnifères. Un regain de vie s’ensuit et pendant un court moment il travaille en studio à New York, reprend ses concerts en Europe, mais de plus en plus éreinté, incapable de retrouver son énergie d’antan, il en annule certains. Il a 27 ans lorsque sa compagne le découvre inanimé, emporté par les barbituriques. Hendrix “produisit une musique brûlante qui finit par le brûler” (240), conclut cet Hymne. Pomona College (CA) Monique Saigal TARDIEU, LAURENCE. La confusion des peines. Paris: Stock, 2011. ISBN 978-2-234-07014-1. Pp. 154. 16 a. Laurence, the narrator, attempts to understand and ultimately transcend certain traumatic events in her life. In 2000—the year of her mother’s death—her father ’s condemnation and semi-imprisonment for political and financial corruption induce her into an intolerable vertigo, a bewildering stupor where the safe, comfortable, and rational world of her youth falls apart. Nonetheless, if her father’s disgrace entraps her into a wall of shame and disillusionment, ironically it is the recognition of this very entrapment that compels her to seek clarity and to understand her father, this hero of her youth, this refined and educated man of distinction. Such effort towards understanding comes about through the act of writing a book ten years later, something she feels must be accomplished to express both the refusal to remain enclosed in the past and the need to free herself from the burden of shame: “Je prends la parole parce que je ne peux pas faire autrement. Je prends la parole pour reprendre mon souffle” (19). Writing is pathbreaking for the narrator. She gives voice to the ways in which silence and secrecy characterized her relationship with her father and with her family and, more particularly, the events surrounding her father’s guilt and detention. Writing enables her to comprehend how silence worked against and eroded any attempt toward real communication. It is precisely this same silence that engulfed her and the entire family in a world of hypocrisy, where outward appearances mattered more than the sincere expression of feelings, and where the tumult and confusion of the irrational were covered up neatly by the plastic smoothness and politeness of the rational: “Chez nous, des mots, il n’y en a pas eu: il fallait taire ce qui était monstrueux” (50). Throughout the novel, the narrator seeks answers regarding her father’s disgrace and wrestles to find the manifold meanings behind his continued silence. In light of the fact that the narrator never ceases to express love for her father, this novel is not a work of hate but rather of defiance, considering her father’s opposition to its composition. Yet the narrator understands the risks in undertaking such a work, that she might incur lasting silence on her father’s part. However, the gamble is necessary in order to establish her own identity, to exist on her own 428 FRENCH REVIEW 86.2 terms, all of which has been worked through by the process of writing, culminating in words addressed to her father: “Je veux exister. M’appartenir. Ne plus m’éteindre devant toi” (92). This book has made it possible for her to realize that the shame she endured for so many years stems from her failure to have confronted her father sooner: “Oui, j’ai honte d’avoir accepté, pendant dix ans, au nom de l’amour, de me taire” (140). At last, her shame has been erased: “Depuis que j’ai commencé ce livre, mot après, mot, la honte s’efface” (130). Tardieu’s writing is exquisite and crystal clear. The...