La raparille by Fadel Dia

Tiphanie Yanique's Don Bogen's JohnDAgata's audacious stories. fragmented clarity. idiosyncratic mosaic. Fiction, page 71 Verse, page 73 Miscellaneous, page 77 WORLD LITERATURE IN EVIEW FICTION Don DeLillo. Point Omega. New York. Scribner. 2010. 117 pages. $24. isbn 978-1-4391-6995-7 Don DeLillo has been flirting with relatively short forms, novellas more than novels, since the triumph of his magnum opus, Underworld (1997). His latest offering, Point Omega, continues this trend with seven fewerpages than his briefest previous volume, The Body Artist (2001). Devotees craving another weighty tome on theorder ofUnder world or Libra (1988)must continue their vigil. Those happy with any scraps DeLillo may toss theirway, however, may well find this slen der work much to their liking as it echoes and extends some of the most intriguing motifs, themes, and obsessions of the DeLillo oeuvre. The central story is told by Jim Finley, a young filmmaker hoping to make a documentary starring Richard Elster, "just aman against a wall" talking about his secretwork with Iraq War planners. To this end, Jimvisits Elster in the desert "somewhere south of nowhere." After they settle into a pattern of drinking and talking in which Elster demonstrates his mastery of charm ing words into "makeshift reali ty," conversations surrounded by extended desert silences, Elster's daughter Jessie joins them.Never fullyat ease with her father,or Jim, she hovers about thehouse "sylph iWorlId Literature Today like," "fixed tightlywithin." Little attracted to Jessie physically, Jim feels vague sexual urges culminat ing in a strikinglyunderstated cli mactic moment: he opens her door one night, strains to see her lying in bed, and realizes she had been watching him as his eyes adjusted to the dark. She turns to face the wall; he withdraws. The next morn ing, she is gone, never to be seen or heard from again. After an exten sive search finds nothing, Jimand Elster give up and leave the desert behind, Elster reduced to a drool ing, wordless old man: "For weeks there had been nothing but talk. Now nothing to say." The film,"the one where somebody stands and tells the truth," will never be made. Jim's tale is framed between opening and closing chapters, "Anonymity" and "Anonymity 2," narrated by an "anonymous" observer watching a man (anony mous and/or Jimhimself) watch ing a wall, the moma exhibit of 24 Hour Psycho. As thenovella closes, anonymous/Jim's obsession with theHitchcock classic at two frames per second reaches thepoint of his waiting "to be assimilated, pore by pore, to dissolve into the figure of Norman Bates" pixelated on the museum wall. Readers looking for plot will complain that nothing happens, and yet absurdist/minimalist drama abounds as DeLillo writes and rewrites his wonted motifs: walls, words, wars, saying, see ing, telling, time, naming, mean- = ing, and unmeaning. This is a book = about the exhaustion of human = consciousness, the end of "mean- = ing," the omega point ("introver- = sion") of the title, "meaning what, = the thunder maybe, a soft evoca- = tive rumble sounding down the = years." Slim as itmay seem, Point = Omega leaves Don DeLillo with his = major postmodernist credentials = not merely firmly intact but tell- = ingly enhanced. = /.B. Rollins I National Chung Cheng University = Fadel Dia. La raparille. Paris. Pr?sence E Africaine. 2009. 189 pages. 18. isbm| 978-2-7087-0790-0| Set during the nineteenth century, E in the cityof Saint-Louis in colonial- E era Senegal, Fadel Dia's novel La E raparille is structured around a series E of conversations between a rich old E lady, Toinette, and the lawyerwho E is in charge of preparing her last E will and testament. In the course of E their successive discussions, of Toi- E nette's intermittent reminiscences, E and of the first-personnarration of E the lawyer, a portrait of an unusual, E privileged caste emerges in what E was at the time themain outpost E of the French colonial enterprise in E West Africa. Toinette is a "signare," E an African or mixed-race woman E who has been married to (and has E been lefta widow by) several well- E connected French men. Through E their social links

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