The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Passer en douce à la douane: L'ecriture minimaliste de Minuit: Deville, Echenoz, Redonnet et Toussaint by Ficke Schoots
Renée Kingcaid

Ficke Schoots. Passer en douce à la douane: L’ecriture minimaliste de Minuit: Deville, Echenoz, Redonnet et Toussaint. Rodolpi B.V. (Amsterdam and Atlanta), 1997. 234 pp. No price listed.

It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it—impose some sort of order on what continues to be a near manic production of high-quality literary novels in France. In this study of four contemporary French novelists—Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint—Fieke Schoots takes an excellent stab at it. It is not the least quality of this book that Schoots recognizes up front the perilousness of the classificatory enterprise: the four novelists were selected for their having been published by the Editions de Minuit (home of Beckett, and of the Nouveau Roman) during the 1980s and for having been, roughly, included in Minuit’s advertising campaign of “impassible” authors. The group does not constitute a “movement”; skillfully, Schoots points up their commonalities without neglecting their differences to offer a clear and cogent description of their “minimalist” appurtenances. In contrast to the “reductions” of American minimalism in art, music, and literature, Schoots defines the minimalism of these four French novelists as a reexploration of the multiple resources of language and narration. For Schoots, the French minimalist story is neither “simple [nor] impoverished: it is characterized by the attention directed to the materials of novelistic writing, by the decomposition of novelistic procedures and by the precision with which the language is manipulated” ( my translation from the French). Schoots’s criticism—intelligent, circumspect and clearly organized—is a model of the genre: it makes you want to rush to the novels themselves, not to judge the analysis but to enjoy them as much as the critic obviously has. Schoots’s final discussion of the place of the minimalist current in terms of succession to the Nouveau (Nouveau) Roman and postmodernist thought is perhaps less successful, but that is undoubtedly owing to the nebulousness of the terms “modern,” “modernist,” “postmodern,” “postmodernist” themselves. In one sense, Schoots’s taxonimy is a drop in the bucket, but this bucket, in general, could use lots more drops like this. [Renée Kingcaid]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Passer en douce à la douane: L'ecriture minimaliste de Minuit: Deville, Echenoz, Redonnet et Toussaint by Ficke Schoots Renée Kingcaid Ficke Schoots. Passer en douce à la douane: L’ecriture minimaliste de Minuit: Deville, Echenoz, Redonnet et Toussaint. Rodolpi B.V. (Amsterdam and Atlanta), 1997. 234 pp. No price listed. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it—impose some sort of order on what continues to be a near manic production of high-quality literary novels in France. In this study of four contemporary French novelists—Patrick Deville, Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint—Fieke Schoots takes an excellent stab at it. It is not the least quality of this book that Schoots recognizes up front the perilousness of the classificatory enterprise: the four novelists were selected for their having been published by the Editions de Minuit (home of Beckett, and of the Nouveau Roman) during the 1980s and for having been, roughly, included in Minuit’s advertising campaign of “impassible” authors. The group does not constitute a “movement”; skillfully, Schoots points up their commonalities without neglecting their differences to offer a clear and cogent description of their “minimalist” appurtenances. In contrast to the “reductions” of American minimalism in art, music, and literature, Schoots defines the minimalism of these four French novelists as a reexploration of the multiple resources of language and narration. For Schoots, the French minimalist story is neither “simple [nor] impoverished: it is characterized by the attention directed to the materials of novelistic writing, by the decomposition of novelistic procedures and by the precision with which the language is manipulated” ( my translation from the French). Schoots’s criticism—intelligent, circumspect and clearly organized—is a model of the genre: it makes you want to rush to the novels themselves, not to judge the analysis but to enjoy them as much as the critic obviously has. Schoots’s final discussion of the place of the minimalist current in terms of succession to the Nouveau (Nouveau) Roman and postmodernist thought is perhaps less successful, but that is undoubtedly owing to the nebulousness of the terms “modern,” “modernist,” “postmodern,” “postmodernist” themselves. In one sense, Schoots’s taxonimy is a drop in the bucket, but this bucket, in general, could use lots more drops like this. [Renée Kingcaid]

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