La confession de Charleroi by Aliocha Vandamme (review)

VANDAMME, ALIOCHA. La confession de Charleroi. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. ISBN 978-20812 -4835-9. Pp. 350. 19 a. History professor Aliocha Vandamme’s first work of fiction delves into the alternately serious and humorous state of humanity and the unpredictable universe that we inhabit. At the center of this world in decline is Charleroi, a city ravaged by wars, mining, and industry, punctuated by mine dumps and World War I cemeteries with white crosses. Yet the novel’s geographical anchor is the picturesque Charles II square with its fountain and a church that Boris, the novel’s central protagonist, enters to confront the Abbé Thierry Degueldre on his philosophical ideals. The resulting dialogues between the two men diverge from religious questions, mimicking the plot’s spatial development away from the church into other parts of Charleroi, where Boris ventures with trepidation. Like Beatrice Portinari of Dante’s trilogy, Ornella, a young woman of unusual powers inexplicably drawn to the protagonist, guides Boris on these journeys in which present events and surrealist moments overlap with Boris’s memories. In these third-person narratives, Boris remains a detached observer, who stops time to momentarily lose himself in the mundane trials and tribulations of those he encounters in order to avoid confronting his inner fears. The confession of the novel’s title is that of the city as a collective entity, whose inhabitants are revealed to be living with the guilt of secrets and regrettable past acts. Paul Dupré, who locks his wife in the house and prostitutes her to anyone to whom he lends the key, does so out of vengeance and frustration. Brasserie owner Norbert Bucquoy, a former Katangan gendarme during post-independence Congo, relives the violence he helped perpetrate while pining for his beloved Térésa. Ludovic Taillepied, a militant anarchist who served time for a seemingly violent crime, unsuccessfully tries to lose himself in the scale model of Charleroi that he populates with tragic characters inspired by the faits divers of the city’s newspapers. Bachir, Boris’s Palestinian friend now living in Charleroi, must recognize that he was unknowingly responsible for his son’s voluntary death in a suicide bombing. Degueldre and Boris also have painful truths to confront and revelations to share. Boris’s journey and the people he encounters humanize the otherwise apathetic view of existence proposed by Vandamme’s reinterpretation of the Big Bang theory: “l’univers est une histoire belge, et Charleroi en est le centre, une Grande Éclate farceuse” (327). In this world of disorder, Boris deems two Belgians to be the geniuses of the twentieth century: Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory, and the more widely recognized accident-prone Gaston Lagaffe, of the comic strip Spirou. La confession de Charleroi also combines scientific theory with sarcasm to illustrate the universe’s propensity toward disorder and confusion. Grandiose pronouncements on mankind’s fate alternate with bizarre interludes , such as the irreverent environmentally sound aerial cemetery where the body of Boris’s recently deceased mother is placed atop trees for consumption by uncooperative vultures. Yet such absurdity has human significance: Dans ce corps déchiré par les rapaces, [on peut voir] une allégorie de notre Belgique toujours en sursis d’écartèlement, mais aussi une allégorie de notre pauvre Charleroi déchiquetée par les appétits capitalistes qui l’ont dépouillée de sa substance et la rejettent maintenant comme une écorce vide. (269) Reviews 1215 Vandamme’s novel effectively weaves the fantastic with the realistic, the tragic with the humorous, to convincingly portray how, in a universe that may have no meaning, man’s will to live emerges from dialogue and interaction. Inventive anecdotes, thought-provoking conversations, wistful songs, and bawdy short stories populate the novel and demonstrate that the written word continues to play an integral part in the affirmation of life, particularly in the contemporary world. The universe will always produce stupidity, failure and insignificance, but it is also full of beauty, love and art, even in Charleroi. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius Linguistics edited by Stacey Katz Bourns BURGUY, GEORGES FRÉDÉRIC. Grammaire de la langue d’o...