EMMANUEL HOCQUARD (1940-2019) is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui (with a corresponding English volume, 21+1 American Poets Today) and 49+1. In 1989, Hocquard founded and directed "Un bureau sur l'Atlantique", an association fostering relations between French and American poets.
Co-director of a small press (Orange Export, Ltd.) and head of the Section Poesie at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris, Hocquard is also a poet. Of his five published books, this one is the third to appear in English. This short, poetic novel is autobiographical, yet detached and evocative. The cerebral action consists of scenes and flashbacks that transport us from New York to Sicily, Greece, and back to antiquity. Poetry is identified as a ``passage,'' and the narrator is a wanderer through time and space. Hocquard's poetry may not appeal to a vast audience of poetry lovers, yet his writings provide a very personal vision of very basic human emotions: love, desire, coexistence, and the strong need for identity balanced by the need for privacy. Davis's translation is quite faithful to the original, which contains a fair amount of linguistic nuances and subtleties. Recommended for most libraries.-- Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern California Lib., Los Angeles
It's not only his fondness for Cranach the Younger's painting of Eve and his telltale aversion to fruit that identify this French novel's narrator, Adam, with his namesake. His friends propose that he lacks a soul, that he is an ``empty'' man with an ``incapacity for living''--marks, perhaps, of the first of a species, a creature without a history. As such, Adam is susceptible not to facts so much as to colors and images, but Hocquard doesn't describe these with enough poetry or universality to ensnare the reader. Unlike his namesake, this Adam has several Eves on several islands--in Turkey and Greece, off the coast of Africa and, above all, on Manhattan. But his American Eve (the Aerea of the title) won't commit because, she says, ``I would never be able to marry a man who was satisfied with so few words and so few ideas.'' The real trouble with the novel, though, is that Hocquard gives Adam a damn sight too many words--and tedious ones they are: ``Navigation is a disquieting art, June, but on that gloomy art depends the life of an island. The shipwright and the knacker begin their work by felling trees and animals, in the red of birth, the red of the slaughterhouse and the shipyard.'' (Dec.)
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