Choir by Eric Chevillard (review)

returning to France. To purchase her plane ticket, she has stolen money from Joy, the one person who trusts her. Then she foolishly spends most of the money on couturier clothes to impress Pierre, her sculptor lover, and, as a result, cannot afford the return ticket. One of the strengths of this book is its backwards chronology, which helps to hold the interest of the reader. The entire thread of Isabelle’s life is developed backwards, through a gallery of portraits of major characters, both Japanese and French, whom she lives with and tries to control, usually through sexual domination . Each chapter title bears the name of an important character (Yokota, Joy, Pierre, Nicolas) as well as locations (Tokyo, Paris, and Tarare), along with dates ranging from 2006 to June 1995. Each chapter relates the disintegration of a relationship and the subsequent chapter explains the cause of that break-up. Gradually we see Isabelle’s faults more clearly. Her extreme self-absorption blinds her to the times she oversteps her boundaries and causes one relationship after another to be stretched beyond the breaking point. Early on, she defines fun as shopping with her husband’s credit card, and she is irritated because he expects her to cook, clean, and do laundry after the housekeeper is dismissed because they are drowning in debt. With subsequent men, she exhibits even more selfcenteredness . Repeatedly, as the failure of each relationship becomes apparent, Isabelle recites the words of the children’s song, “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse.” The last chapter gives the reader the key to this final bit of the puzzle of Isabelle’s life. Obviously she is fixated on the high point of her life, when she truly was a queen elected by her home town, for these words are part of the ceremony when the Queen of Chiffon is crowned. Although Laure Buisson may not be widely known outside France, several Web sites about her and her prior works are available. An interview with Pierre Besson, broadcast on Europe 1 and accessible through Google, is especially interesting. Readers who wish to contact the author can find her on Facebook. Messiah College (PA) Lois Beck CHEVILLARD, ERIC. Choir. Paris: Minuit, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7073-2089-6. Pp. 271. 19 a. The fictional world that Eric Chevillard sketches in his latest novel (his sixteenth for the Editions de Minuit, in a career inaugurated in 1987 with Mourir m’enrhume) is as curious, dark, and unrelieved as any he has yet imagined. As its name suggests, it is a fallen world, one where professional mourners attend each birth, such is the unbearable weightiness of being. Choir is undoubtedly an island; yet none of its inhabitants has been able to chart it, each expedition bogging down, one after the other, in the generalized inertia that seems to rule this world’s metaphysics. The people who inhabit Choir—“Mavrocordato,” “Ulagan,” “Vachir,” “Targoutaï,” “Dojoodorj,” “Jagun,” “Ho’elun,” “Chatagaï,” “Trask,” “Vasser,” “Pomo,” to name just a few—practice a misanthropy that brings them only rarely into contact with each other. When they do meet, it is mostly to tear each other apart, either literally or figuratively. It is not surprising, thus, that the foundational social principle on Choir is that of denunciation. How children come to be conceived is barely understood moreover, for the very idea of sex, involving a close encounter of two consenting adults and leading to procreation, seems absurd. From their first moment of consciousness, one overriding ambition animates 610 FRENCH REVIEW 84.3 each of these benighted people: to leave Choir, somehow to escape from this horrible , guano-covered place. Yet with one lone exception, no one has ever been able to do that, so hobbled are they: “Nous trébuchons à chaque pas, et souvent c’est la chute (de là viendrait le nom de Choir)” (55). The exception is a distant ancestor named “Ilinuk,” a figure lost in a past that may be more mythological than factual. Ilinuk did indeed escape from Choir, and he did it in rare style, by way of a homemade rocket. His epic, told again and again by the...