Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls by Suzanne Kocher (review)

beginning of the Third Republic and its attendant “first wave of consumerism” as the point where crime fiction “first impinged on the national consciousness” (17). Discussions of Poe, Conan Doyle, Gaboriau, Leroux, Leblanc and others trace a move away from what Dorothy Sayers called “an Aristotelian perfection of beginning , middle, and end” (30). Christopher Shorley’s analysis of the first cycle of Simenon’s œuvre (1931– 34) situates the author among such interwar crime writers as Christie, Hammett, and Sayers, as well as among Gide, Malraux, Steeman, and Véry. Shorley notes that Simenon’s Maigret, by contrast to earlier protagonists of the genre, is marked by a “carefully detailed and reassuring ordinariness.” He further differentiates Simenon’s work by noting that the author’s language is “crisp [and] unfussy” (44), lending itself to “the economical creation of mood.” And finally Shorley observes that, for Maigret, “comprehension counts for more than apprehension” (45). Next, Gorrara’s own contribution views the roman noir as “a form of social investigation, a disabused narrative of its times, often narrated from the perspective of the dispossessed, excluded and marginalized” (54-55) using the works of André Héléna, Jean Amila, Terry Stewart, and Léo Malet, many of which “confound reader expectations [through the use of] unreliable first-person narrators [to] challenge our assumptions about [. . .] coherence” (60). Moving from discussions of hardboiled and roman noir developments, Susanna Lee studies the crime fiction of the late 1960s and identifies the ’68 rebellions , the rise of commercialism and the rise of television as the major conditions contributing to the development of the néo-polar, literature of “killing sprees, of absence of narrative closure [. . .] and [. . .] characters who could not care less about social cohesion” (75). In the penultimate essay, Véronique Desnain highlights the difficulties and ironies in literature’s consideration, since the 1960s, of women both as polar writers and as characters, in its labeling the genre and in its avoiding (or parodying) stereotypes in the polar féminin. She calls creating female characters in crime fiction “a loaded exercise” which some authors preferred to avoid by focusing on male characters (92–93). In the final essay, Simon Kemp brings crime fiction through the OuLiPo (Queneau, Perec) and the nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon, Butor, Pinget, Revel, and others) up to the present era (Pennac, Kristeva, Echenoz, Modiano) focusing on the aspect of the “deliberate malfunctioning of the [. . .] plot” (107). Taken as a whole, French Crime Fiction presents a solid grounding in the history of the genre, sharpens the reader’s appetite for a more thorough engagement with it and provides a useful scorecard for appreciating it. But perhaps not necessarily as canon fodder. University of Arkansas Virginia Bellott KOCHER, SUZANNE. Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. ISBN 978-2-503-51902-9. Pp. 216. 60 a. Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls is complex, both stylistically and in content. Its challenges are especially great for undergraduates encountering the text Reviews 377 with little exposure to medieval literature. Kocher succeeds admirably in making Porete’s work accessible to diverse audiences and enriching our reading of it. The introduction situates the Mirror in the context of mysticism, provides information about dates and manuscripts, and establishes its importance as the oldest known mystical work in French—and the sole surviving medieval text by a woman executed for heresy. Kocher also presents the characters of the Soul and Reason, explains the medieval use of the term “mirror,” and offers a general stylistic analysis. The first—and longest—chapter treats Porete’s life and writing. After providing the mystic’s biographical information, Kocher explains the difficulties in identifying her. Porete’s trial is a topic of discussion, yet Kocher notes that the study’s goal is to focus on the Mirror and not on Porete’s potential heresy. Kocher then highlights the Mirror’s manuscript tradition, the variety of the text’s audiences , its repetitive structure, and the way the work borrows from visual and written culture and from oral sources. Stressing the importance of the literary and theological context, Kocher discusses Porete’s analogues, the influence of...