Le silence de ma mère by Antoine Silber (review)

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-Con-dansle -Ciel,” but unlike Tevye, Simon’s God responds in the same mocking and critical tone he himself adopts. The latter’s divinity becomes a magnified projection of himself. The structure of the novel is complex in that there are multiple narrative voices, all in the first person. Judith, Simon’s sister, also gives expression to her frustrations and despair through various narrative interludes. She has an even more acute sensitivity to the absurdity of existence than her brother as she repeatedly attempts suicide. In fact, the novel is set into motion when Simon is forced to return to France and give up his new life in Vancouver, “Kanada,” to come to her rescue after she has attempted to kill herself again. For Judith, life simply has no meaning, and she finds it impossible to go on from one day to another in such a hopeless situation. A third narrator who begins each of his or her chapters with the phrase “J’établirai que ” serves as an implied author, at once subjective and semi-omniscient, who provides the reader with information Simon and Judith are incapable of communicating themselves. There are also extensive quotations from letters, remembered comments, and telephone calls made by Simon’s mother and father, and these constitute yet another instance of multiple narrative voices. In the end, both the protagonist and his sister attain a kind of salvation. Judith’s spirit is liberated by a middle of the night swim she takes at Deauville after she makes Simon drive her there. She undergoes a sort of ritual cleansing. Later Simon is not only reunited with the girlfriend he left behind in Vancouver but decides to live in Israel with her now that she has converted to Judaism. Another upbeat element is provided by the neo-Rabelaisian style of writing employed by Sagalovitsch. The text is peppered with outbursts of verbal intoxication where he repeats the same thing in several different and imaginative ways. One word conjures up another through similarities in sound, spelling, or meaning. He especially favors the ternary style, expressing thoughts in a sliding triplicate form. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy SILBER, ANTOINE. Le silence de ma mère. Paris: Denoël, 2011. ISBN 978-2-2071-0933-5. Pp. 131. 13,50 a. Silber has capped a successful and wide-ranging journalistic career with a first-person novel, reading like a memoir. His internal dialog about his mother is a blend, and not always an obvious one, between sessions with a therapist and his own memories—and these are rarely chronological, often circling back to random events with a recall of additional details or feelings. The probing questions 998 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 of his therapist, Anne, and Antoine’s rambling reminiscences weave a contradictory image composed of fondness, alienation, haunting, unanswered questions, and unresolved and conflicted thoughts—all directed to the mother who has been dead for twenty-eight years, but whose presence is still keenly felt. Silber’s childhood took place during World War II, yet, surprisingly, this historical period is neglected and the focus is consistently on Antoine. His memories are rarely of anyone besides his mother, and occasionally his father. Antoine’s Jewish father, more interested in literature than his family, never talked about the Holocaust or even his escape from Dachau, although he spent the early years of marriage in hiding from the German occupiers. Only at...