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In a volume that will engage scholars of literature and music alike, Kathryn Lachman's Borrowed Forms considers how Francophone, Anglophone and Hispanophone writers have appropriated musical arrangements to negotiate the positioning of transnational voices. This interdisciplinary exploration of the novel's function and force takes as its focus the work of Maryse Conde, Assia Djebar, Nancy Huston and J. M. Coetzee in order to demonstrate the impact of transnationalism on the concepts of authority, representation, hybridity and belonging. Arguing that the late twentieth century's acknowledgment of musical form in fiction is representative of the need to narrate the experiences of marginalized peoples in an increasingly globalized era, Lachman interrogates four musical concepts-polyphony, counterpoint, variation and opera-that have been deployed in fiction to 'open up alternative ways of conceiving relations among different subjectivities, histories, and positions, and provide a dynamic means to challenge and renew literary forms' (p. 1). The monograph's first chapter, 'From Mikhail Bakhtin to Maryse Conde: The Problems of Literary Polyphony', explores the political and structural workings of polyphonic writing. Aiming to add greater nuance to the 'broad, generalized understanding of polyphony' (p. 30) that she argues pervades contemporary critical discourses on the Caribbean aesthetic and on Conde's writing specifically, Lachman undertakes a survey of Bakhtinian and Derridean positions on the concept. She contends, however, that neither understanding accounts for Conde's very specific effort toward literary polyphony that constitutes her novel Traversee de la mangrove. Claiming that the text's multiple narrations somehow subvert polyphony, Lachman writes that Conde is attempting to find her own voice in the strands of that of others-a voice that, because of her own transnational identity, is 'necessarily fractured, borrowed, hybrid, composite, provisional, written, and silent' (p. 57, emphasis in the original). Lachman's second chapter makes use of Edward Said's contrapuntal notion of musical counterpoint alongside Algerian writer Assia Djebar's fiction, the latter aiming to juxtapose dialogically the intersecting histories of France and Algeria while remaining aware of the violence of the past. Reading Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Lachman demonstrates the novel's non-attribution of dominance to any one voice, and illustrates the complex interaction between culturally variegated subjects who 'contaminate, deterritorialize, and transform one another' (p. 87). Invoking Michael Rothberg's now-famous model of multidirectional memory, Lachman argues that Djebar's exposure of the contradictions and conflicts between the disparate histories in the novel are the very means by which counterpoint is achieved-resulting in a cacophonous work of fiction which allows differing, but intimately interrelated historical, transnational and textual legacies to encounter one another productively. 'Glen Gould and the Birth of the Author: Variation and Performance in Nancy Huston's Les variations Goldberg' is the volume's third chapter. Considering the politics of translation, language, performance and narrative ownership in the transnational novel, Lachman presents a reading of Huston's text that, in its interactions with the writings of Glen Gould, seeks to explore the implications of the form of musical variation for literature. Lachman's reading demonstrates the transformative potential of musically inspired transnational writing; performance, Lachman writes, is 'a dynamic site of ritual, play, risk, and reciprocity' (p. 112) that, she argues, Huston seeks to reproduce in her literary reproduction of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The variation model of both performance and literature, as Lachman demonstrates, ultimately facilitates an interrogation-and, in certain places, a shift-of the boundaries demarcating the limits of form, readership, identity, language and performativity. The final chapter of the volume analyses the role of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Despite the ultimate failure of Coetzee's protagonist David Lurie to produce the opera he hoped to, Lachman argues that his encounter with this musical form nevertheless has much significance for considerations of representation, literature and art in post-Apartheid South Africa. Lachman offers a particularly insightful discussion on empathy and the recognition of the other in Coetzee's text; the construction of the opera, she argues, forces a reconsideration of subjectivities that in turn provokes new empathetic modes of thinking-and, indeed, of reading-the concepts of belonging, gender, place and home. While Lurie's somewhat parodic opera, unfinished and unperformed, refuses the communicative potential musical form possesses, the act of his attempt at its creation, Lachman argues, is symbolic of an effort towards a musical alternative to a language contaminated by a history of extreme racial discrimination and violence. This novel, Lachman insists, and much of postcolonial writing, compels us to think about difference and its preservation-and Disgrace, she argues, is a paradigmatic example of how, despite the difference in form, 'music and literature can commingle without dissolving into one another' (p. 134). Lachman's Borrowed Forms is as interdisciplinary as it is compelling. Her volume is rich with significant biographical detail about the transnationalism of each author, replete with valuable textual and theoretical allusions throughout, and strong in its analytical voice. Musical forms reproduced in literature, Lachman argues, house the potential for movement across boundaries, time, binaries and cultures. In the departure from traditional form that the literary invocation of polyphony, counterpoint, variation and opera signals, the writer is able to re-attribute agency to the colonized, endow the silenced with voice and convey plurality where historical singularity once stood. In short, literature's turn to music facilitates the representation of historical and identificatory alterities that are neither marginalized nor usurped by the voice of another. Reading musically, Lachman however warns, must not be limited to a relation of seduction; rather, she insists, readers must attend to the renegotiation of subjectivities, histories and nationalities that the presence of music in transnational fiction implies. AYALA MAURER-PRAGER UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON -- Ayala Maurer-Prager Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 6.1. Spring Lachman's Borrowed Forms is as interdisciplinary as it is compelling. Her volume is rich with significant biographical detail about the transnationalism of each author, replete with valuable textual and theoretical allusions throughout, and strong in its analytical voice. Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 61.1

It is a bold, broad, and innovative study. It will be of interest to all those who work with these complicated, engaging, and fascinating encounters between the literary and the musical. Kathryn Lachman's book is not simply about the replication of musical form in literature but is a wide-ranging study of how writers and thinkers have engaged with the musical, its structures, and its performance across national traditions, and from which she extrapolates ethical concerns.

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Kathryn Lachman is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literatures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Co-chair of the Five College Faculty Seminar. Born in South Africa, violinist trained at the Yale School of Music and Paris Conservatory, Assistant Concertmaster of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, recipient of the Henry Hart Rice Fellowship for research in Beirut Lebanon in 1998, wrote for the Dailystar in Beirut and taught at the American Community School in Beirut from 1998-2001. PhD Princeton University (2008), Simultaneous award of the MA and BA degrees from Yale University (1998), Premier Prix in Violin Performance and Music History from the Conservatoire National de Région de Paris, 1995

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