Un Homme louche by François Beaune (review)

competition. In spite of a number of obstacles—including the hasty construction of his racing vessel—Peter leaves his family with wildly high hopes of a victorious return. His ambitions are shattered when a number of early mishaps set him far behind his rivals. Well aware of the dire effects his loss in the race will have on family finances and his reputation, Peter devises plan B: that is, he will retrace his voyage back to England and invent an alternate ship’s log to represent falsely the circumnavigation he never made. As the story unfolds, it comes to light that Peter’s faulty reasoning is only one manifestation of an increasingly troubled mind and troubled conscience. While all this is taking place at sea, the family and friends Peter has left on land alternate between despair over his silence and jubilation over his possible victory. Some of the novel’s dramatic tensions come from the fact that developments on Peter’s sailboat are almost always out of synch with the “reactions” at home. Autissier uses the tried-and-true conceit of the “discovered manuscript” to good effect. Peter’s journal (not the counterfeited log) is re-opened by his daughter, Eva, decades after the disaster. Eva reads her father’s entries contiguously with her own journal from that period, thus giving us the sea-and-land narratives (also, intergenerational narratives) as one story. The effect is one of missed dialogue and lost opportunities for intimacy and understanding . Eva reads the journals out of unresolved anger and guilt, but as a consequence, she is better positioned to recognize her father’s overwhelming feelings of guilt—the legacy of his relationship to his parents. One of the small pleasures of Autissier’s text is its historic and technical accuracy. She makes Peter March the rival of three sailors who really did complete the 1968–69 race: KnoxJohnson , Moitessier, and Tetley. Of course, the novelist does use some poetic license with the historic record to make Peter March’s story fit better. Autissier, an experienced solo sailor, wields with ease both nautical terminology and sailing science, which should gratify readers who are curious about the technical aspects of solitary ocean sailing. For other readers, this sensitive account of a man confronting his demons in not-so-splendid isolation should be worth the read. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March BEAUNE, FRANÇOIS. Un Homme louche. Paris: Verticales, 2009. ISBN 978-2-07-012603-3. Pp. 344. 20 a. Written by a young author, 31 years of age, this novel intrigues the reader through the hallucinatory atmosphere created around the protagonist, JeanDaniel Dugommier. Un Homme louche is divided into two parts and is presented in the form of a diary: the first part details events from October 1982 to April 1983, and the second is set some twenty-five years later, in 2008. During this hiatus Jean-Daniel seems to have spent some time in a psychiatric ward. He also had a child who in his teens committed suicide by defenestration. The diary of the first part presents a troubled youth, not unlike today’s urban hoods. The narrator, furthermore, seems to have troublesome relationships with both his sister and aunt. This is easily understood as he lives in a tenement project where all “chalets” look alike and are not conducive to a healthy upbringing: “Nous sommes une petite communauté de quatorze chalets de type jurassien. Un minuscule préau sert de refuge et de centre sportif et culturel aux enfants des 608 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 chalets, comme on nous appelle en ville” (18). His sister Emma also seems to have trouble adapting, as Jean-Daniel observes: Elle met le livre au micro-ondes, le règle à trois minutes et démarre la cuisson [...] Elle sort le livre qui a cuit tout son temps. La page de couverture, telle une entrec ôte sauce Roquefort, luit d’une lueur surnaturelle. Rien n’est changé. Toujours la même société pourrie de luxure [...] ma sœur donne des cours de lecture au micro-ondes. (24) The first part is a sort of collage that we hope might be elucidated in the second. However...