Les identités d’Amélie Nothomb: de l’invention médiatique aux fantasmes originaires par Mark D. Lee (review)

introduction includes an extensive, but not exhaustive, analysis of the graphical and morphological features of the manuscript’s language with a particular emphasis on its regional characteristics, which are predominantly Picard. To facilitate comparisons between the manuscripts, the editors have reproduced in the introduction a table of corresponding strophes, which had appeared in the original 1887 Windahl edition. The textual apparatus is amply supplemented at the end of the volume with a table of proper names; a rich, eighty-seven-page glossary; an index of all of the work’s rhymes; and an index of proverbial expressions, a number of which, it should be noted, do not appear in either Morawski’s or SchulzeBusacker ’s reference works. But the most impressive feature of the critical apparatus is the 120-page set of notes. They demonstrate an encyclopedic familiarity with Old French and Latin materials that are relevant to the understanding of a text that is both rich in its regional and artisanal vocabulary and heavily allusive . Beyond the usual editorial comments, one finds therein a wealth of information concerning biblical allusions; the theological texts of the period; juridical and vestimentary language; falconry and gaming; and the vocabulary of debt, finance, and taxes with special attention paid to the practice of various loans at interest in thirteenth-century Arras, where the bishop was purportedly quite tolerant of such activity. Despite the fact that the edition includes a facing-page translation of the text into modern French, all of this historical information will prove critical to any reader who hopes to gain more than a superficial understanding of Robert’s unfinished poem. The poetic allusions of his moralizing rants against usurers, gluttons, and lawyers, and against the corrupting power of money would be inaccessible without it. A married cleric who frequented the elite of thirteenth-century Arras society and who belonged to the “Confrérie des jongleurs et bourgeois,” Robert Le Clerc was, according to the editors, not only the author of this collection of 312 douzains, but also of the Loenge Nostre Dame, of which Annette Brasseur is currently preparing a critical edition. The present edition represents a considerable contribution to the scholarship of the period that should interest both students and specialists of the literature, language, and history of mid-thirteenth-century France. Amherst College (MA) Paul V. Rockwell LEE, MARK D. Les identités d’Amélie Nothomb: de l’invention médiatique aux fantasmes originaires. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 978-90-420-2967-5. Pp. 294. $84. Since the publication of her first novel in 1992 at the age of twenty-five, Amélie Nothomb has been a best-selling author and media figure in France. But it was probably her Stupeurs et tremblements in 1999, since made into a film, and her equally autobiographical Métaphysique des tubes in 2000 that brought her to the attention of readers and scholars in the English-speaking world, inspiring the first international conference on her work, held at the University of Edinburgh in 2001 (which resulted in the essay collection edited by Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette den Toonder, Amélie Nothomb, Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice). The new study in French by Mark Lee develops the idea of identities, in the plural, as a basis for the interpretation of Nothomb’s entire published work to date. Having gained access to Nothomb’s dossier de presse at her publisher Albin Michel, Lee begins by tracing the evolution of Nothomb’s image in the French 754 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 media, from the moment when her first submitted manuscript, Hygiène de l’assassin , was recognized in Le Monde des livres as a first novel comparable to those of Le Clezio and Modiano decades earlier. Others (including the prestigious Gallimard, who dismissed her first submitted manuscript as a prank) suspected “Amélie Nothomb” of being a pseudonym for an established male writer, like the major character in her novel. This doubt about her identity extended even to her family name of Nothomb—“personne, même en Belgique ne pouvait s’appeler comme ça” (Nothomb quoted by Lee [24])—ironically, because the Nothomb family is well represented in Belgian history. In fact, Lee...