Des hommes by Laurent Mauvignier (review)

menace la Belgique [...] c’est de devenir un non-pays comme la Suisse, une pure surface diplomatique, un pays à colloques” (51). De longs passages sont consacr és aux antécédents historiques de l’UE, chaque personnage échafaudant une théorie sur les origines et le devenir de l’Europe, ce qui tend fréquemment à assimiler ce roman à un essai. L’auteur a sans doute cherché à mener de front le récit fictionnel et l’essai politico-philosophique, constructions parallèles n’ayant pas pour objet d’aboutir à un traditionnel roman à thèse. La tension entre ces deux composantes du livre (ainsi que la narration éclatée, morcelée, faite de bribes que les lecteurs doivent recouper pour y trouver une certaine continuité) reflète une vision quasi-baroque de l’Europe, toujours en peine de concilier l’unité et la diversit é qui figurent pourtant dans sa devise: “Blocs-séquences d’histoire signifiantes, ajointés péniblement, mal. Attestant de la discontinuité, chose irrémédiable” (295). Constellation constitue un projet littéraire ambitieux, malheureusement alourdi par un excès du jargon qui rend illisible la plus grande partie des documents issus de l’UE. Un livre à l’image de l’Europe: inachevé, constitué de fragments de qualité variable, encore à la recherche d’une cohérence d’ensemble. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin MAUVIGNIER, LAURENT. Des hommes. Paris: Minuit, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7073-2075-9. Pp. 281. 17,50 a. Laurent Mauvignier’s most recent novel, his seventh for the Editions de Minuit, is a dark parable of the ways in which the past inflects the present. Bernard, known familiarly as “Feu-de-Bois,” is a man of sixty-three years whose life has come to nothing. He is an alcoholic; he has no job; he is alienated from his family; he has no friends. After having spent most of his adulthood away from the small village where he grew up, he returns there to live. If indeed one can call that mode of existence “living,” for his principal concern is to indict and belabor the people of La Bassée, those folks who were able to come to terms with the world in ways that he himself found unacceptable. On the occasion of his sister Solange’s sixtieth birthday, violence breaks out, and along with it a spate of remembrance. The novel is narrated by a man named Rabut, who is a cousin to Bernard and Solange. More than anyone else, it is undoubtedly Rabut who represents the kind of compromiser against whom Bernard rails. Rabut is someone who manages to find accommodation in even the most nightmarish situations . Prejudice, injustice, and long-simmering resentment combine to construct a catastrophic present in Des hommes, yet Mauvignier suggests that the origins of that catastrophe must be sought in the past. The particular past that haunts the present in this novel is the Algerian war of independence. Both Bernard and Rabut had enlisted in the army, forty years prior to the narrative “now” of the text, as a way of escaping a grim, rural, and proletarian existence. Both of them served in Algeria for the standard twentyeight months, from 1960 to 1962. Both of them witnessed their share of atrocities, yet they carry those experiences forward in very different ways. They performed their service anonymously, both with regard to their fellow-soldiers and in relation to the native population. Speaking of Bernard, Rabut remarks: “Il n’est pas seul à être seul, ils sont tous seuls ensemble” (161). Both of them wonder, upon occasion, if their service is worthy of that of their fathers, whether at Verdun in the 424 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 First World War or in the Resistance in the Second. In his worst moments, Bernard imagines himself in the role of the German occupier—and the image of Oradoursur -Glane seems suddenly more apposite to him than does that of Verdun. A very grim secret looms in Des hommes, and from the beginning of the novel Mauvignier tantalizes us with the prospect of finding out just what that secret entails. Some readers may find his game of narrative hide-and-seek a bit wearying after a...