Celle qui manqué par Camille Allaire (review)

discussion of older women in fiction created by these women writers as a counterpart to those in the mostly male-authored texts studied. A bibliography and index conclude the book; the former conveniently separates primary and secondary sources. Scholars and students of eighteenth-century French literature, women’s studies, and cultural studies will find this publication an invaluable addition to their library as it engages with scholarship in all these areas. University of North Texas Marijn S. Kaplan Creative Works edited by Nathalie Degroult ALLAIRE, CAMILLE. Celle qui manque. Montréal: Triptyque, 2010. ISBN 978-2-89031681 -2. Pp. 98. $18 Can. Brevity can be a virtue; in this collection, the shortest texts sometimes feel the deepest. In “Des épines dans les paumes,” set in a dark forest, there is literal depth—as a narrator describes two characters’ “dure bataille” (41) to escape from an uncertain threat. The environment remains figurative: “La forêt noire ne nous appartient pas. Elle se dresse entre les âmes et piège les amoureux” (41). Yet regardless of what is actually happening, the reader senses physical closeness between two characters, a visceral fight for some sort of release: “Les yeux bouffis, les cheveux emmêlés, les pieds ensanglantés, nous nous attaquons, machette à la main, à ces ronces piquantes et noueuses qui repoussent à une vitesse folle” (42). Other stories share much more detail: names, descriptions of recognizable modern settings (like river banks and the front seats of Buicks). These stories are less poetic—giving names, for example, and descriptions of what characters (men, women, and adolescents) are doing or feeling while injecting fairly straightforward reflections about childhood and paychecks. Many of Allaire’s characters seem ill-equipped (materially, verbally, or emotionally) in their responsibilities toward others but nonetheless yearn to bridge that distance which, it seems, is often “celle qui manque.” The stories work well together because they all show how important life changes can hinge on a particular moment or series of events. In “Contre Lina”, a teenage girl, confined to her room, anxiously cuts her name into her arm, while her depressed mother grieves over her own bad choices on the other side of the door. The title story, “Celle qui manque,” reads like a heartfelt eulogy for a beloved mother while “Barcelone” focuses on a young woman’s journey from Quebec to Spain to meet her dad who has no idea that, behind her banal conversation, she just wants to say “que c’est pour lui qu’elle est venue, juste pour lui” (18). Husbands and wives also inhabit these sparse little worlds. In “Rien de romantique ,” a middle-aged wife recounts the full run of her marriage, from the oui of the wedding to the “je suis dévastée, dévastée, dévastée” (47) of the very last line, after her husband has left her for another woman. In “Deux ou trois livres,” a man starting over wonders which of his books he ought to bring along. For him, literature has become a wound, “la cicatrice d’un manque perpétuel” (73). Dying has its place—in animals as much as people. In “Entre nous les chiens,” a dog, 202 FRENCH REVIEW 85.1 wounded by an automobile, slowly dies outside the restaurant where the narrator drinks tea with a friend who is frustrated with the narrator’s not paying attention to the conversation. “Notre propension à ignorer ce à quoi nous ne sommes pas naturellement ou biologiquement liés, ou qui ne nous affecte pas directement ,” says the narrator, “me troublait” (65). Troubling, surely, for such an empathic narrator, but most of the characters in this collection are experiencing a much more direct loss—to themselves, their own health, things that “affect them directly.” The most unusual story in this book is surely “Récit d’un naufrage,” a diary-like rendition of an actual 1914 shipwreck in Antarctica. Stylistically similar in most ways to the other stories, “Récit” feels a little more developed than the others. It ends with a footnote, documenting the historical inspiration, which seems odd for a book written in such an otherwise lyrical style. Nonetheless, it falls into place somehow, in its...