AFRICA & THE WEST INDIES.
Cordova, Sarah Davies
Algeria
Albert Bensoussan. Le chant silencieux des chouettes. Paris.
L'Harmattan. 1997 (released 1998). 108 pages. 65 F. ISBN 2-7384-5983-8.
Albert Bensoussan's novel Le chant silencieux des chouettes
extends and resonates with his previous works. Referencing another facet
of the author's ongoing historical narrative of the Jewish
people's diaspora, its title alludes to the metaphorical shipwreck
of the narrating protagonist, Abraham Benayon, and thus recalls another:
Djebel-Amour ou l'Arche naufragere (1992; see WLT 67:4, p. 871),
whose text is likewise transcribed in diary form. The
semiautobiographical and familiar character to Bensoussan's
readers, the university professor from Rennes, is now retired. Following
his "legitimate" wife's suggestions, they have moved,
first to Belleville for a few months, and then to Pollentia, on the
island of Majorca, where they will decide to buy the house they are
renting for the summer. Propped up in his rocking chair- his anchor, as
he refers to it-and cared for by his wife and the housekeeper, Abraham
attempts to avoid sinking into despair. Chronicling his sense of
abandonment and exclusion, his reminiscences carry him away to his
secret Wednesday afternoon rendezvous in Rennes with his young friend,
the masculine Barbara, to their gradual estrangement, to her decision to
have him sire her lover's child, and to her refusing him paternity
rights.
Washing up like waves on the beach, the introspective narrative is
divided into twenty-six chapters whose variously recurring headings-
"Escale," "Nadir," "Zenith,"
"Derive," "Vertigo," "Acme"-decline
spatially the protagonist's recollections of his physical and
psychological states over the course of the thirteen-year relationship.
The chapters are dated chronologically except for a series of
"notes du scribouillard," which all bear the same date and
which are unevenly intercalated throughout. As these notes comment upon
the narrator's personal story, they also contextualize historically
and allegorically the narrator's assertion that "fuir etait le
seul espoir de salut."
The theme of survival surges iteratively from both the diary
entries and the notes du scribouillard. Indeed, this recit is also the
history of fifteen Jewish families who survived the Spanish Inquisition
by converting to Christianity and whose descendants are still living and
plying their trade as jewelers in Majorca. And it is on this Balearic
coastal point halfway between Algeria and France, "loin de la foule
en parfaite extra-territorialite," that the protagonist's
sentimental nomadism across the sea of life seeks help in finding a safe
harbor: "Et felouque de voguer sur mer sans houle, en baie des
trepasses du dernier age, guidee du seul chant silencieux des
chouettes."
Although translation is an act of love for this polyglot author,
foreign idioms, specialized vocabularies, colloquialisms, wordplays, as
well as linguistic and intertextual digressions swell the prose of his
recit. Together with the stylistic interventions of a too-self-
conscious authorial voice, they tender a heavy, opaque text, one which
seems to mirror the protagonist's self-indulgence rather than the
example of the chouettes' silent song.
Sarah Davies Cordova
Marquette University
