Vies de Job by Pierre Assouline (review)

refuse la “loi du père, la loi du juge” (166), et à un cadre légal prompt à la seconder , il est entravé dans son rôle d’homme, privé de ses droits parentaux et atteint dans sa dimension d’être humain. Aussi l’histoire d’amour qu’il vit avec la narratrice n’est-elle que secondaire. C’est leur expérience commune de l’adversité qui les rapproche et qui semble constituer leur identité. “On est des Schwartz” (182), lui dit-il. Reprenant le matronyme qu’Angot, abandonnée par son père, portait dans sa jeunesse, Billy associe leurs difficultés existentielles. Mais il confère aussi aux siennes une origine suspecte, en désignant, par ce nom allemand, la couleur de sa peau. Ainsi, l’écrivaine, en relatant les déconvenues conjugales de son compagnon et en brossant son ancienne conjointe en mégère machiavélique, manifeste bien plus qu’une solidarité sentimentale. Elle se livre à une dénonciation du racisme et à un renversement des clichés. À travers la victimisation de Billy, elle dévoile l’oppression d’un homme noir par une femme blanche avec la bénédiction de la société. Western Washington University Cécile Hanania ASSOULINE, PIERRE. Vies de Job. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-07-012539-5. Pp. 491. 21,50 a. The common struggles of writing biography versus fiction are everywhere present in this narrative. Assouline is the narrator who sets out to research a biography about the hero of the Book of Job. As an author of biographies (on Simenon, Hergé, Cartier-Bresson, and Gallimard), the narrator identifies himself as a credentialed biographer. However, Assouline the author is also a published novelist (Lutetia, Le portrait, Les invités), so fiction writing is also a possibility. The narrator of this story does evolve from biographer to novelist through experiments with autobiography, a novel with an index, and the ultimate divide: his unending research into Job’s identity. The Book of Job itself has an enormous bibliography. The writer confronts centuries of scholarship, translation problems, and ideologically enmeshed interpretations by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, as well as the cultures that have appropriated the eponymous non-Jew. As the narrator sorts through these various complications, he also adds his own personal obsessions with Job’s predicament (“Que reste-t-il lorsqu’il ne reste plus rien?” 29) in approximately the fourth century BCE and the appropriation of his narrative since then. The common denominator of Job’s lives is what interests the narrator. Let us call the narrator “Pierre” to distinguish him from the author “Assouline.” Pierre is searching for Job’s voice in the midst of all the noise about who Job is and what he tells us he is. There are questions about Job that haunt Pierre: Why did Job’s problems become ours? How does a book of Wisdom survive with an enemy as its hero? How do you combat injustice if it hides its name under a mask? One other question resonates: What was the name of Job’s wife? She has no name in the Book of Job where she disappears when Job’s friends arrive. Around 1650 CE, Georges de la Tour painted Job and his wife. Subsequently, in the 1930s, this painting received the title of “Job Being Admonished by his Wife.” She has a face in the painting. Her waving finger gives her a personality beyond the words in the Book. But still her only name is her relationship to Job. Reviews 975 Pierre’s story evolves through anecdotes about his search for the eschatology , context, and origins of Job. Pierre focuses his research in East Jerusalem at the Saint-Étienne Convent that houses the Dominican École biblique where French is the language used for discussions by researchers, usually at mealtime. East Jerusalem, of course, is an Arab cultural and linguistic setting while the Israeli universe is less than two hundred yards away. So Pierre is in the midst of French, Arabic, and Hebrew languages as he studies the texts of interpretations about the Book of Job. He meets an intriguing assortment of researchers who come from around the world to use the...