Bibliographic record
Abstract
L'Enigme du retour, by Dany Laferriere. Montreal: Boreal; Paris: Grasset, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7646-0670-4. 289 pages; 301 pages. CND 24.95; EUR 18.00. By now, anyone who has a passing interest has heard about the accolades Dany Laferriere's latest novel, L'Enigme du retour, has earned: winner of the French Prix Medicis 2009 and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2009. quick survey of the French press on both sides of the ocean would indicate that these two prestigious literary prizes are richly deserved. This novel, the twelfth in his autobiographie americaine, is a hybrid of verse and prose, and travels from Montreal to New York, and from there to Port-au-Prince and Petit-Goâve. The catalyst for this voyage is the death of his exiled father. The novel poses two fundamental questions: Is it possible to go home again? Or, was it even possible to leave to begin with? This book is both a distillation and an expansion of his previous eleven novels. He has written in verse in the past (Chronique de la derive douce) and in haiku (parts of Eroshima), but he has never hybridized to this extent. This is also his most expansive novel in terms of setting. All of his previous novels had, for the most part, very focused settings (Montreal, New York, Petit-Goâve, Port-au-Prince), and his life in North America was dealt with separately from his life in Haiti. His travels, an eleven-novel journey from Haiti to Montreal and back to Haiti, are now brought together in a 300-page book. The cast of characters is also expanded to include the boys and men of his family, people he had previously ignored. As he put in the dedication of Le gout des jeunes filles, A tous ces hommes, a leur maniere sinceres, courageux et honnetes, qui trouveront un jour, j'espere, leur chantre. Pardonnez-moi de le dire, seules les femmes ont compte pour moi. Perhaps not explicitly, but implicitly, his exiled father always loomed large in his life; the absence bled into an absence of all the men of his family. If Pays sans chapeau was in part about the friends Laferriere left behind after being forced into exile, then L'Enigme du retour examines those family and friends his father left behind, including one of the women of his family who has never before been mentioned in his novels: his sister and her family. It is hard to read this novel in isolation from his other works. Just about every page recalls some part of a previous novel. The book opens with the call that his father has died. The narrator gets into the bath to reflect and to prepare for his upcoming journey. Near the beginning he talks about his old Remington 22, his love of books, and his initial poverty in Montreal (Comment faire l'amour avec un Negre sans se fatiguer). He also mentions that he has only packed one bag for his trip home: jette, dans une valise, deux ou trois jeans, trois chemises, deux paires de chaussures, quelques sousvetements, un tube de dentifrice, deux brosses a dents, une boite d'aspirine et mon passeport. This passage closely resembles Comment faire l'amour avec un Negre sans se fatiguer towards the end, when the narrator catalogues all that he sees around him in his apartment. But it also recalls the first chapter in Pays sans chapeau, LA VALISE: - Ou sont tes baggages? me demande ma mere avant meme que je l'embrasse. - Je n'ai que cette valise. - Ah bon! dit ma mere tout en essayant de cacher son etonnement. - Elle fait le meme poids que celle que tu m'as donnee quand je partais il y a vingt ans. As he says in L'Enigme du retour: repartirai avec une petite valise. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".