Nowhere is Perfect: French and Francophone Utopias/Dystopias ed. by John West-Sooby

WEST-SOOBY, JOHN, ed. Nowhere is Perfect: French and Francophone Utopias/Dystopias. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2008. ISBN 978-0-87413-048-5. Pp. 252. $30.00. West-Sooby is not new to utopian studies; in 2006 with his colleague, Jean Fornasiero, he edited an issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies entitled L’Utopie en mouvement. Here, sixteen participants, almost half from the University of Adelaide, including West-Sooby and Fornasiero, and three-fourths from Australian universities, plus one each from France, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the United States, have written, in English or French, on varied topics. In his introduction, West-Sooby surveys all contributions, remarking on the “apparently endless permutations” (9) in the representation of utopias or dystopias. The authors discuss texts ranging from Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748) to Gisèle Pineau’s novel, Fleur de barbarie (2005), with an emphasis on the twentieth century. They analyze novels, films, historical phenomena, and political theory. Articles treating crime, incarceration, the colonial system, and the French imaginary stand out. The first, by Jacqueline Dutton, examines the nineteenthcentury penal colony, through historical research and examples drawn from literary texts. When we think of nineteenth-century prison literature, Balzac’s Vautrin and Hugo’s Jean Valjean may come to mind, but the inclusion of the colonial dimension broadens the discussion considerably. Dutton looks at the “success” of the British in Australia and studies the French decision to locate similar institutions , not in Australia as first contemplated, but in New Caledonia and Guyana. Dominique Kalifa treats a later period (1890 to World War II), with an examination of the military “Biribi,” defined as “un nom donné aux structures punitives et pénitentiaires de l’armée française en Afrique du Nord” (44). To create a context for this complex web of “punitive structures,” Kalifa details the role of antimilitarism , conscription, journalistic investigation, and popular culture’s fascination with the underbelly of society (see FR 83.3, 706). William Jennings’s article on Gide might be linked to these two, through its analysis of Gide’s representation of family as prison, here with a “Foucauldian perspective” (141). Similarly, two essays on Antillean literature, with their point of departure as the “colonial island prison,” could be incorporated into such a thematic cluster. The first, by Peter Poiana, treats Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Edouard Glissant’s transformation of that “island prison” into a “model of cultural dynamism and invention” (168). The second, by Bonnie Thomas, looks at the optimism of Gisèle Pineau, a psychiatric nurse, in her “‘third way’ around the paralyzing effects of a painful past and their psychological and physical consequences on successive generations” (187–88). To speak only of these, however, is to neglect studies of the effect of Fourier’s ideas on Baudelaire, Banville, and Gautier; the “mécène de l’utopie” in THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 84, No. 3, February 2011 Printed in U.S.A. REVIEWS Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger 580 Paul Adam and Zola; the reception of Romain Gary’s work; the “deux arts de guérir” (213) in Hervé Guibert’s Le Protocole compassionnel; the “construction of a hybrid identity” (241) in several Beur texts; or the Vichy propagandist Philippe Henriot. Nor can we consider two interesting texts on cinema, one on Jacques Tati’s Playtime in dialogue with utopian architecture, the other on two films by Philippe Grandrieux. Unfortunately, bibliographical information must be extracted from the notes following the individual essays. The absence of a bibliography may be attributable to cost-cutting, understandable in difficult times. Nonetheless, the carefully-edited volume is well worth consulting and deserves space on library shelves. Occidental College (CA) Annabelle M. Rea PABAN, GABRIELLE DE. Le Nègre et la créole, ou Mémoires d’Eulalie D***. Ed. Marshall C. Olds. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN 978-2-296-07037-0. Pp. xl + 236. 25 a. Originally published in 1825, Gabrielle de Paban’s story details the life of Eulalie D***, a member of a French colonist’s family in Saint Domingue (Haiti) who, as a 5-year old, is separated from her father on the family...

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