Sylvie Germain: regards croisés sur 'Immensités'. Avec la participation de Sylvie Germain (review)

Since the publication of her first novel, Le Livre des nuits, in 1984, Sylvie Germain has emerged as a major voice in contemporary French writing. Her fiction has inspired academic conferences, a prolific collection of essays, several edited books and two monographs–not one as is stated in the introduction. This critical volume focuses on Immensités, one of the most widely read of her novels. Although Immensités did not receive the most prestigious literary prize among the many awards Germain claims for her work (Prix Louis Guilloux 1994), it marks a turning point in her career, as from its publication onwards, the author was able to devote herself entirely to her creative writing. This study is composed of eleven articles, preceded by a few pages introducing the pieces included, and ends with a short text by Germain on the eighteenthcentury Prague sculptor Matyas Braunch, very relevant to this critical volume since the Czech capital and its Baroque past feature so prominently in Immensités. Germain's final article also considers various Baroque poets, among whom Bedřich Bidel, quoted in the novel, bringing some light on its intertextual content. As the volume suggests in its title, the approaches displayed are varied, both regarding the cultural background of the authors (from Austria, Britain, France, Israel and the Netherlands), and their areas of specialism (literary studies of course, but also, musicology and theology). Although the editor justifies her desire to consider Germain's novel in isolation (p. 7), it might have been useful to provide more contextual information on a work of fiction first published in French in 1993, in English (translated as Infinite Possibilities by Liz Nash) in 1998 and now part of a broad fiction corpus by Germain of about thirty books. Isabelle Dotan's and Mariska Koopman-Thurlings's analyses establish some links between Immensités and previous novels, but more in-depth mapping, in particular as regards the publication and reception of the novel would have been useful. Nevertheless, these 'regards croisés' offer original and contrasted perspectives on Germain's creative attempt to go beyond the binaries of life, identified by Fortin as a recurrent theme haunting Immensités (p. 76). Thus, Lanot's consideration of silence and space between different beings and different species as 'un interstice où se dessine l'intersubjectivité' (p. 30); Demanze's analysis of the dialogues and tensions between the genres of tale versus novel; Garfitt's appropriation of Daniel Heller-Roazen's Echolalias in interpreting reminiscences and resonances; Mulder's reading of a text which is also acoustic and lyrical; van den Hoogen's investigation of how 'un homme peut échapper à l'ordre des choses en descendant dans la dynamique des corps et des mots' (p. 147). A stimulating volume for scholars and students of 'l'extrême contemporain', which shows that, as Roelens concludes in her article, 'quelles que soient [s]es tentatives de dépassement, Sylvie Germain restera toujours attachée à la culture judéo-chrétienne, sa sœur prodigue' (p. 137).