La guerre m’a surprise à Beyrouth by Carmen Boustani (review)

of perception. The poetic images often reflect the hermetic symbolism to which we are accustomed from surrealistic paintings—fascinating but hard to decipher. These images in Bourque’s collection are samples of pure poetry and absolute beauty—absolute in the etymological sense, i.e., absolved from the burden of everyday realism and, thereby, truly surrealistic. The author has, however, not followed blindly André Breton’s concept of écriture automatique. Despite its sometimes dreamlike imagery, Bourque’s poetry is well crafted. New effects are created by the introduction of medical terminology from the author’s professional environment . The human body is experienced as a sign system: “mon ventre n’est qu’un signe” (12). Body and mind reveal their interdependency: “Ta chair est étendue dans les sinistres mémoires” (31). This volume gives testimony to Bourque’s indebtedness to, but also his eventual liberation from surrealism. This is especially the case in the second part of the collection, where the author combines the perception of nature with the description of the feelings for the other, obviously absent person. Fall and winter landscapes mirror the inner world of the observer who suffers from loss and separation. It becomes obvious that nature poetry in the works of Canadian authors represents a heritage of Romanticism adapted to the conditions of the New World. In this regard, the author of this collection finds himself in good company, since the tradition of nature poetry à la québécoise even reaches into the lyrics of such famous chanson singers as Félix Leclerc and Gilles Vigneault. The prolific literary critic and FrenchCanadian poet, Jean Royer, wrote in the afterword of his anthology, La poésie québécoise contemporaine (Montréal/Paris: Hexagone/Découverte): “La nouvelle poésie québécoise qui s’écrit depuis 1965 a conquis le terrain de son langage” (244). Royer made this assessment in 1987. Le temps malhabile not only confirms Royer’s conclusion, but also stands out as a new milestone in contemporary literature from Québec. Ocean County College (NJ), emeritus Gert Niers BOUSTANI, CARMEN. La guerre m’a surprise à Beyrouth. Paris: Karthala, 2010. ISBN 9782 -8111-0406-1. Pp. 251. 20 a. Yasmina, a feminist professor in Beirut who has French and Lebanese citizenship , spends most of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel in her highrise apartment, often in front of her computer screen exchanging E-mails with her friends and colleagues around the world, sporadically writing a journal, reflecting on life in mini-essays, and composing scholarly articles. She also goes to see her mother in her village, travels to Tyre and Sidon to examine war damage, and receives visits from women friends, some of whose lives have been devastated by the war. Others, like Yasmina herself, seem mainly inconvenienced and worried. In a period of truce, she cheers herself up by getting beauty treatments: massage, facial peel, and even a Botox injection to look younger for Marc, her unfaithful lover who is also a world-famous artist. The femme de ménage arrives regularly, and her mother’s gardener shows up with fruit from the family garden and looks after her plants. Raised as a Catholic, educated in Lebanon and France, accustomed to presenting at conferences around the world, Yasmina lives among sophisticated intellectuals who dress elegantly, drink champagne, own vacation homes in various countries, and gamble at casinos. Boustani does use some of Reviews 979 Yasmina’s acquaintances to present a broader picture: one has lost her home in southern Lebanon to Israeli bombardments; some leave the country to avoid the war; yet another, a Christian, discovers that she is pregnant by the Shiite whom she has secretly married. Yet despite the explosions and smoke, despite the bomb damage, land-mine wounds, and burning buildings, the war seems distant, more news event than personal experience. It is hard to believe that Yasmina really feels that she is living in a nightmare when her life is filled with so much luxury. Her cosmopolitan friends are the sort who, she writes, once made Beirut into the Paris of the Middle East but are being marginalized by growing fundamentalism. She sees the “jeunesse chrétienne” emigrating because...