Contemporary Fiction in French ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary Fiction in French ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams Maeve McCusker Contemporary Fiction in French. Ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xii+ 289 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–47579–2. Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams have brought together in this superb collection some of the most commanding voices writing on contemporary fiction in French today. In their Introduction, the editors establish the inclusive parameters of their project: over twelve chapters, the diffracted, polycentric land- and cityscapes of contemporary fictions are showcased and celebrated, and the binaries of centre/periphery, metropole/ex-colony, French/Francophone undermined. Indeed, this commitment to decentring is palpable even in the volume's internal architecture. The collection opens with Edwige Tamalet Talbayev's 'Mediterranean Francophone Writing', a bracing incipit which identifies the Mediterranean as a decentring paradigm enabling us to understand 'new forms of social and cultural transactions which bypass the usual pattern of dominance between France and its ex-colonies' (p. 17). This post-postcolonial conviction complements Charles Forsdick's interrogation of the shifting borders between French, Francophone, and world literature. Forsdick traces, in the interval between three manifestos, Pour une littérature voyageuse (1992), Pour une littérature-monde (2007), and 'Nous sommes plus grands que nous' (2017), the increasing prominence of the transnational and the translingual writer. Simon Kemp's After the Experiment', on the much-vaunted return to the story/subject/world in French fiction after 1980, argues that experimentation and play remain nonetheless crucial in terms of narration and genre. Russell Williams analyses the anxious, occasionally exuberant embrace of American culture (crime fiction, cinema, music) by a wide range of novelists, while Laurence Grove's essay charts a series of revolutions catalysed by the graphic novel. Helena Duffy examines works by 'Russophile' authors Andreï Makine and Antoine Volodine, showing how uncomfortable political realities (notably of the Putin era) are sidestepped in their fiction in favour of the nostalgic tropes of the classic nineteenth-century Russian [End Page 625] novel. Taking as her springboard the 'orientation' process enshrined in French post-16 education, Anna-Louise Milne brings a welcome consideration of class and cultural capital in astute close readings of Ernaux, Kaplan, and Guène. In 'Fictions of Self' Shirley Jordan zeroes in on Jacques Roubaud and Marie Ndiaye, whose 'restless experimentation' (p. 166) exploits the elasticity of truth and fiction in life-writing. Jordan concludes that, while the truth/fiction binary so prevalent in 1990s scholarship 'has lost some of its critical purchase' (p. 165), the particular appeal of self-fictionalization in women's writing is often rooted in trauma. Max Silverman also considers trauma, in an essay that ranges from Delbo to Huston and Sansai; acknowledging the value of, and opposition to, the 'connective mode' that would read histories of violence across temporal, national, and ethnocultural boundaries (e.g. linking the Holocaust to colonial history), he concludes that 'we are all implicated in histories of violence, often in ambiguous ways' (p. 183). Subha Xavier's 'Wretched of the Sea' analyses boat narratives by Haitian and Vietnamese writers, and points the way to further stories emanating from the Mediterranean and Roma camps. Gillian Jein's chapter interrogates urban peripheries as fictional locations enabling the exploration of structural violence, and shows how 'neoliberalism's attachment to discourses of regeneration and integration' (p. 217) in fact perpetuates inequalities. Martin Crowley's closing essay shows how civil war, deployed in contemporary narrative to investigate social inclusion and exclusion, ultimately 'maintains the unity of the Republic as the key reference point' (p. 235). That Houellebecq, Daeninckx, and Ernaux (the book was published just before the award of the Nobel to the latter) have the most substantial index entries is perhaps predictable; the absence of Maryse Condé and Marie Nimier may surprise. Overall, the collection, which testifies to an increasing non-alignment of novel and national imagination, all the while acknowledging what Crowley deems fiction's 'centripetal force' (p. 235), is required reading for anyone interested in contemporary fiction in French. Maeve McCusker Queen's University Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association