World Literature Today (Oklahoma), Fall 1977
Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette (Story of the chasm and the telescope)
By Katharine W. Carson
Baruch College, CUNY

Pierrette Fleutiaux is a brilliant young writer the compelling qualities of whose singular imagination brought her considerable acclaim with the appearance of her first novel, Histoire de la Chauve-Souris (Story of the bat). Her second book, Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette (The Story of the Chasm and the Telescope), is a collection of eight " nouvelles " which, taken together, comprise a sort of metaphysical journey wherein the ambiguous author-narrator plots his or her vertiginous course in a quest for space and for a balance between contingency and eternity.
The book is a curious fusion of existentialist themes (contingency, alienation, anxiety, nothingness), psychological symbolism and surrealistic hallucination - all refracted through the author's obsessively mathematical optique. Between the introductory story - an excursion into pure fantasy - and the concluding one, philosophically titled Le dernier angle de traansparence (The last angle of transparency), the purposeful narrator, armed with various tools and precision instruments, pursues his or her quarry in a notional universe of gaping chasms, crumbling buildings and apocalyptic occurrences. (American readers in particular will be intrigued by the author's remembered perceptions of New York, the locale of some of the book's most nightmarish episodes.)
The book contains several puzzles (a favorite English world of the author herself). One is the vacillating gender of the narrator. The " Je " of Histoire du gouffre, for example, turns out to be a man. Yet one would not suspect this from the series of brooms, casseroles and vacuum cleaners he deploys so freely at the beginning of the story. This ambiguity continues throughout the collection.
In spite of its earnestness - and indeed the reader is prone to share the narrator's frustrations, anxiety and solitude - the book is not unrelieved by humor, much of it achieved by the juxtaposition of banal details with philosophical dilemmas.

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