Des gifles au vinaigre by Tony Cartano (review)

walking in solidarity in the annual march before the Tishri festival and recalls biblical verses of the coming of the Messiah. Le troisième jour is an intriguing story rendered in a poetic prose in which Arabic and Hebrew mix with the French narration to bring present day Jerusalem to life. Music and language shape the form and content of the novel. Rachel’s concert features the music Dvorak wrote during his foreign travels, a metaphor for the characters’ existences. The Hebrew vav, which fascinated Rachel’s father, when placed before some verbs in the Bible, alters the verb tense from future to past and from past to future. Likewise, Boukhobza suggests that the past, however painful, does not disappear, but rather forms the future: “Le bonheur n’efface pas le désespoir. Il s’écrit dessus. Il s’écrit avec les histoires du passé” (199). Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius CARTANO, TONY. Des gifles au vinaigre. Paris: Albin Michel, 2010. ISBN 978-2-22621528 -4. Pp. 267. 19 a. Tony Cartano’s title translates a Spanish exclamation that his father, “A.,” used when he encountered adversity: “Hostias en vinagre!” The formula, uttered “avec des intonations très diverses” (93), was a lively defiance of fate, whether it was defeat at the hands of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, when A. was an anarcho-syndicalist fighting for the Republic; or the moment when French authorities separated him from his comrade, Eusebio Torres, in the refugee camp in southern France; or his confrontation with death in 1973. The “phrase sybilline” (93) is a verbal legacy for the narrating son, Antonio. Although Cartano labels Des gifles au vinaigre a “roman,” it has a large autobiographical component, alternating between the father’s legend and the narrator’s self-portrait. Imagination is the best means of finding his father’s truth: “Faire d’un père l’objet d’une fiction n’est pas sacrilège, surtout si l’on considère qu’il fut un être d’illusion, entièrement façonné par l’utopie” (116), the utopia being the experiment of the Spanish Popular Front. The narrator divines his father’s past, over and above the few reliable anecdotes and documents that punctuate the plot. In 1936, A. was a machinist in the Hispano-Suiza automobile factory in Barcelona. He earned spare change as a dancer at the club Las Estrellas Muertas where he encountered Andrea, a taxi-dancer whom he married and with whom he had a child, Carmen. When A. goes into combat, Andrea abandons him for a Falangist nobleman, though circumstances bring A. and Andrea back together on the Republican side in 1937, only to separate them definitively once A. returns to the front. A. goes into exile at the fall of the Spanish Republic, when French border authorities change the original “Cartañá” into “Cartano” (65). His new life in France begins first in the internment camp at Gurs (from which he escapes in 1940), then as a worker at the Breguet aviation works, and finally, after the war, helping his new soulmate, the narrator’s mother, Sixta Hernandez, run a business in Bayonne. The two parts of the story, “La Guerre” and “L’Exil,” interact with curious twists. Antonio was conscripted for French military service in 1969, in retaliation for leftist activities during May 1968. Hoping to deport him, authorities raised his father’s status as refugee and foreigner. The narrator was instead medically discharged because of an accident during his otherwise happy childhood at Bayonne, when he lost sight in one eye while playing with a toy dart gun. The 392 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 father wanted to return to Barcelona to get treatment for his son, but was not able to do so in 1948, because of his Republican past. “Pourquoi et comment le fils d’un réfugié de la guerre d’Espagne va soudain, et à son corps défendant, être soumis à l’héritage, à l’ombre pesante du Père...?” (241), asks the narrator, but in fact A. represented the pleasant lightness of being, once he survived the tragic years, 1936–44. Cartano draws portraits of the frenetic first...