La métaphysique du hors-jeu by Laurent Sagalovitsch (review)

loss emerge as the main themes of the novel. The dearth of details and descriptions in Orban’s story, which result in a hazy and porous narrative, reinforce the sense that something is missing. Filled with holes and lapses, the story is an assortment of disconnected episodes that poignantly illustrate the frustration resulting from the onset of a diseased memory. Orban’s repeated allusion to a charm bracelet highlights the connection between objects and memory, between present and past. She first mentions the bracelet when her mother arrives in Paris from Morocco for a visit. The sight of her mother’s wrists triggers recollections of a charm bracelet that so intrigued her as a child. Toward the end of the novel, which culminates with the Christmas Eve dinner, the author actually brings the bracelet and several other pieces of jewelry for her mother to put on for the big event, which Orban fears may be her last. These objects, which still intrigue the author, tempt her to try them on: Porter tes bijoux? Porter sur moi tout ce passé? Porter la bague fleur, un peu trop haute à mon goût, montée avec des diamants navettes achetés au détail, porter tous ces souvenirs? Porter tes amants, les exhiber, me réjouir de ce qu’ils t’ont offert, me réjouir de tes trahisons? Est-ce possible, même si tu avais tes raisons? J’ai enfilé le bracelet à breloques qui me fascinait enfant, la bague marquise et la bague fleur et je les ai tout de suite enlevés. (147) The jewelry symbolized everything Orban rejected in her mother—dependence on men and the importance of physical beauty: “Très tôt, j’ai su que je ne serais jamais ce genre de femme” (143). Not only does the charm bracelet remind Orban of her past and how she came to construct her identity in opposition to her mother’s, its very structure as a loose collection of bulky baubles resembles her mother’s memory, which has become a similar assortment of arbitrary things. Such episodes shed light on the author’s struggle to cope with her mother’s fading memory and her own identity. The effort to recover a lost part of her life and the most important and complex person in it creates a strong feeling of nostalgia, which permeates the narrative. Orban underscores this longing to connect with her mother by switching the narration from the third to the second person, addressing her mother directly as though it would be a more effective way of bringing her back from the “kingdom of absence.” But in the end, Orban returns to the third person and describes, in a series of phrases with verbs in the imperfect tense, things her mother used to do. This final list of random recollections, like the charm bracelet, underscores the fragility of remembrance, and the metaphor of life as a collection of memories. East Carolina University Marylaura Papalas SAGALOVITSCH, LAURENT. La métaphysique du hors-jeu. Arles: Actes Sud, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7427-9558-1. Pp. 159. 17 a. This is a puzzling novel about a thirty-something Frenchman, Simon, who is obsessed with his Jewish ancestry. On nearly every page he makes some reference to the sufferings of the Jewish people throughout history, culminating in the Holocaust. He constantly relates his own personal problems to those of his Reviews 997 people and makes his heritage the mainspring of his identity but at the same time, rebels against the limitations this heritage imposes on his self-definition. He at once revels in and rejects all the Jewish stereotypes of which he is forever thinking. There is even mention near the end of the work of an anti-Israeli Jewish organization that favors returning the land to the Palestinians. By nature, this character is both a prankster and a skeptical human being. One of his favorite pastimes is to don a yarmulke and rush to disaster sites in order to pretend to be a rabbi bringing succor to the afflicted. Like Tevye (the hero of Fiddler on the Roof), Simon has conversations with God, whom he addresses as “le-Grand...