Alain Ferry. Memoire d'un fou d'Emma.

Whisman, Albert Samuel

Alain Ferry. Memoire d'un fou d'Emma. Paris. Seuil. 2009. 272 pages. 19.95 [euro]. ISBN 978-2-02-094510-3

In his most recent work, last year's recipient of the Prix Medicis for best essay (even though the text resembles a novel), Alain Ferry affirms his appreciation of Flaubert as well as his passion for reading and writing literature, celebrating his love for Madame Bovary in a style that presents itself as scholarly while also jubilatory and very witty.

As the text opens, the narrator has just been abandoned by his wife, Eva, for a sailor. As a result, he seeks to purge himself of her memory and to survive his ordeal by turning to literature and, more specifically, to a bovaryste substitution of Eva's absent image with that of the fictional Emma Bovary from Flaubert's most well-known novel. Through seventy short chapters that seem like journal entries, Ferry presents his readers with a more contemporary bovarysme, reversing the gesture of the fictional Emma's choice of models from other authors by choosing Emma herself as a model, creating his own variation on the central problematic of Flaubert's novel.

However, Ferry's most remarkable originality lies perhaps in his contribution to another, more positive aspect of bovarysme outlined by Jules de Gaultier in his 1902 text Le Bovarysme, when he states: "se concevoir autre, c'est vivre et progresser" (to conceive of oneself as other is to live and progress). In Memoire d'un fou d'Emma, Ferry presents Emma as the fictive "other" whose image is transposed onto reality through the narrator's imagination, in a relationship that depends as much on Flaubert's text as on his real-life situation of aspiring author and voracious reader. In Ferry's insightful writing and his narrator's willful self-deception, the gesture normally dismissed as escapism through novels provides, in fact, a useful perspective to approaching literary characters and to understanding the novel itself, in its attempts to strike a harmonious balance between what it is and what it desires to become. In the end, both Ferry and his narrator conceive of themselves as "other," intertextually and stylistically appropriating Flaubert's writing and Emma's reading. Through the cathartic potential of literature, the narrator, by way of Emma's body, subsequently works his way through his problems and emerges from his despair by falling in love with his librarian, eventually substituting her image for that of Eva's. Moreover, in allowing his narrator to have a relationship with a real person, Ferry reveals his desire to leave the image of Flaubert's heroine intact, inviting the next reader to explore and embrace his or her own bovarysme and, as Ferry states, to "open Emma."

Albert Samuel Whisman

University of Oklahoma