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ANDREWES, ÉMILIE. Les cages humaines. Montréal: XYZ, 2011. ISBN 978-2-89261-594-4. Pp. 198. $22 Can. The reader drawn agreeably into Les cages humaines will nod when he learns that Émilie Andrewes majored not in French, but in anthropology, with a specialization in archeology. Still under thirty and the author of three novels thus far, Andrewes is especially apt with objects and practices that, while contemporary, already feel like artifacts—Bazooka Joe chewing gum, Tsingtao beer, and television pervade Les cages humaines like refrains, the kinds of details that make us believe we really are in present-day Hong Kong. This is the story, mostly, of a young man named Lian, who lives with his closeted gay roommate Fushi and falls in love with a young woman named Mei. There are important secondary characters—most notably Mianzi, who sells exotic birds to tourists, and an unusual doctor from Montreal called GFYoung, in Hong Kong as a tourist. Andrewes gradually intertwines these characters. However, because Les cages humaines involves both a murder and a love story, a reviewer ought not to dwell on the particulars of these relationships. Much of the fun of this novel is in its surprises, in the ways it challenges convention. One of those surprises is Andrewes’s sincerity in depicting a world not entirely her own. She avoids overly descriptive passages about Hong Kong, focusing instead on its character-inhabitants. Mianzi, for instance, “a de petits yeux brillants, les cheveux encore longs, ramassés vers l’arrière, et une posture bien droite qui résulte des kilomètres infinis de vélo qu’il a parcourus dans sa vie” (36). Liam takes Mei to a Lamma Island restaurant, described with unpretentious economy: “Peinte en noir et rouge, décoré avec des chapeaux typiques de l’île, le charmant petit restaurant scintille au fond de la rue” (178). Liam literally loses a girlfriend on a date to the zoo, where the girl, having flirtatiously offered an elephant a peanut by holding it between her lips, is grabbed and sucked by the face until she suffocates. “La jeune amie est retombée, le visage bleu, face contre sable,” writes Andrewes, “l’éléphant lui avait donné le baiser de la mort” (28). This kind of simplicity serves the novel well, encouraging a readerly patience for other plot forays one might otherwise have lost interest in (like a strange excerpt, in bad English, from GFYoung’s personal diary). Male sexuality and male-female relationships are fluid in this story, which introduces us to Liam as he obsessively plays a video game in which, by adding more coins, he must convince a female character to remove all of her clothes. Thoroughly smitten later by Mei, and by young prostitutes he visits, Liam is also perfectly at home watching transsexual drag queens sing and dance to Madonna songs in a strip club. He also prostitutes himself to a male client in order to raise money to buy a bird—an event that could have become traumatic in this character ’s life but, because of Andrewes’s mostly matter-of-fact approach to description , just becomes another occurrence in that chain that creates the book’s plot. Andrewes often follows descriptions of events with aphoristic statements encapsulating their meaning. GFYoung’s second rented room is less horrible than the first one he is shown. “Si on appliquait cela à notre vie amoureuse”, reads the next sentence, “toutes les jeunes filles de ce monde choisiraient, comme premier amoureux, un jeune homme laid et méchant, pour être par la suite ébahies, de conquête en conquête” (42). During a trip to Montréal, Mei remembers a recent sadness while napping: “Les traumatismes reviennent sous forme de rêves” (161). Fushi sells fake tickets to tourists at the airport: “Le travail fait et défait les jours. Il façonne la vie des gens, mais il la leur arrache en même temps”(66). For 1190 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 someone so young, Andrewes brings a mature and well-timed new voice to the Quebec novel. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz AUGÉ, MARC. Journal d’un SDF. Paris: Seuil...

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