Économie de l’amour by Victor Beauvais (review)

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 library and discuss their research with the resident Dominican scholars. The Best project, for example, is a thirty-year proposal to adapt technology to all the scholarship ever done on Biblical texts. While there, Pierre also meets Françoise Mies who, with her insights into Job’s hope, brings Pierre a welcome feminine presence to the remarkably male world of Job. Job is also a reference cited by Slavoj Žižek on Chesterton. Thus Pierre’s “biography” sometimes reads like an epic catalogue of the text of Job living in the history of human civilization. Assouline’s passion is infectious. I was inspired to reread the Book of Job for its heuristic role. Consequently I took the Book as the point de repère for my course about social justice and eighteenth-century philosophes. Assouline’s tale becomes much more than his scholarship on Job or the retelling of Job’s story by his tracing Pierre’s engagement, which is worthy of emulation. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne BEAUVAIS, VICTOR. Économie de l’amour. Paris: Lattès, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7096-3533-2. Pp. 204. 17,50 a. France has a time-honored tradition of bestowing upon those of artistic promise modestly-remunerated positions in exchange for modest demands, leaving time to do something more interesting, such as write. Some, such as Mallarmé, or in our own day Leïla Sebbar, have found in teaching the economic solution to creative work, however odd that may appear from inside the beleaguered profession. In Victor Beauvais’s first novel, the twenty-four-year-old narrator’s teaching assistantship in economics amounts to a comfortable sinecure for the simple reason that he has no intention of writing his thesis. So why is he teaching economics? Because he can: as an “X,” or graduate of the elite École Polytechnique, he can do pretty much what he pleases. But most high-paying jobs take a toll on one’s time that he is unwilling to pay. As a writer might do (Beauvais shows every sign of being one), the narrator has thus found at least a temporary solution to the conundrum of making a living vs. living a life. But because he does not present himself as a writer, or in any creative niche except perhaps the cinema, where he spends most of his free time, his dilemma speaks for a broad spectrum of young people. If happiness, according to Freud, requires a balance between work and love, then it makes sense that the most unsettled age should be young adulthood, when neither love nor work tends yet to be firmly secured (Freud was thinking of men, but might profitably have extended his theory to women). Beauvais writes of the age of youthful uncertainties in early twenty-first century Paris with a simple, direct, engaging, authentic-sounding eloquence that speaks to the enfant du siècle and the vague des passions in all of us. Unlike the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu, the “je” of Économie de 976 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 l’amour has no final epiphany about his vocation, and what he will do with his life remains an open question. So does the quest for love, set in dialogue with the economic theme—hence the lovely title. Economics comes into the book through a running critical commentary on this pseudo-science vs. “real” science, entertainingly readable despite the playfully-used occasional mathematical symbol. Giving shape to the narrative is an inventive form of courtship (I venture this...