La Poétesse: homobiographie by Liliane Giraudon (review)

by the earth. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that La Piste mongole is not for the light reader. Christian Garcin is a scholar not only in his references to the smells, sights, and sounds of Mongolia, but also in terms of the politics and religious beliefs of the region, as well as of international cinema, classical music, and English, Russian, and American literature. His is a concentrated writing. He uses a plethora of stylistic devices such as rich vocabulary, imagery, “oraliture,” a play within a play, a novel within a novel, multiple narrators, and two fonts. If one could find fault at all with the novel it would be perhaps the overabundance of minor characters whose names and identities are often confusing. He has, in addition, a sense of humor, for he includes himself in a list of names who “avaient tous été un jour retrouvés recroquevillés dans un terrier, un sous-sol ou au fond d’une grotte, à l’intérieur d’une niche qu’ils avaient eux-mêmes creusée, comme de petits animaux trouvés mort-nés dans l’utérus maternel” (174). Worlds within worlds, multiple realities, the invisible versus the visible, who we are and who we dream we are: complex webs which overlap and penetrate each other. Garcin’s novel is a saga of frontiers and boundaries that clearly do not exist, places where we are and are not, all at the same time. The reader must be patient, and nibble just a bit at a time. “On est entourés de réalités toutes concentriques [...] Il y a des mondes qui se frôlent, où fourmillent fantômes et spectres, revenants, âmes languissantes, esprits de toutes sortes [...] C’est ainsi que va le monde” (222-23). At least, the world according to Garcin. Millburn H.S. (NJ) emerita Davida Brautman GIRAUDON, LILIANE. La Poétesse: homobiographie. Paris: P.O.L., 2009. ISBN 978-2-84682302 -9. Pp. 121. 13,50 a. A challenging, fascinating work that resists genre classification, La Poétesse presents what Liliane Giraudon calls “une littérature accidentée” (44), one that calmly faces down life’s disorder and daily strangeness while ambitiously experimenting with form. Divided into three distinct sections with shared resonances, La Poétesse strikes a balance between pushing literature’s boundaries, questioning social norms and ontological contradictions, and offering an accessible whole that runs the gamut of emotions. Of special note are the varied structures and the interart discourse—“‘écriredessiner’ tout attaché”—that lend originality to this collection while exemplifying Giraudon’s approach to poetry as a space where unpredictable mixes and alternations reinvigorate language as our “bien commun ” (back cover). Giraudon envisions opening a path to a “nouveau livre, un livre défait, [...] un champ sous nos pieds” that resists and whose earth must be continually opened to better fulfill its role of nourishing “tout / Les fous avec les folles / [...] Les folles avec les fous” (121). She inscribes this desacralized resistance into part one by calling it “Ma chérie je t’ai fait des phrases trouvées partout,” a title that invokes intertexts and informality; by configuring this thirty-four-page section from short paragraphs placed in two columns per page; and by starting most paragraphs with “Hier” as an all-encompassing temporal indicator and/or “La Poète” as shorthand for the speaker’s “Mystérieuse identité fugitive” (11). We quickly see how the collection’s subtitle homobiographie took shape, in that the speaker seeks to relate experiences of all kinds without laying special claim to them as any more than the dispersed, dry flow of life “de livre en livre” (42). 416 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 Nonetheless, Giraudon’s fragmented, collage-like form provides intriguing surprises, whether through quietly lyrical turns or measured detachment. Part one succeeds by shifting with clarity and concision between registers, time periods, and sensations: “Hier deux mois que maman est morte. Je ne supporte pas sa perte. Je ne savais pas que ce serait si dur cette idée: elle est morte et c’est pour toujours. [...] C’est ce qu’écrit La Poète” (35). Part two, “Kara...