Tag Archives: France

Book of the month: Leïla Slimani

December 20, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books about books. Specifically, books about reading, writing and translating. This is partly because I find these kinds of books fascinating but also because my next book is going to be about rethinking the way we read. More details to follow soon…

So it was a joy to hear from academic, translator and champion of women in translation Helen Vassallo (if you haven’t yet come across her Translating Women site, it is a treasure trove of insightful commentary and exciting titles) about a new collection of work by French-Moroccan literary superstar Leïla Slimani that she had just brought into English. And an even greater joy when she kindly sent me a copy.

Unlike the novels that made Slimani’s name (chief among them Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny, as it was variously translated into English, which won the Prix Goncourt and became France’s most-read book of 2016) The Devil Is in the Detail brings together three slender works released separately in French. It is the first in a series published by Liverpool University Press with Florida State University’s Winthrop-King Institute that aims to showcase ‘cutting-edge contemporary French-language fiction, travel writing, essays and other prose works’ that ‘reflect the diversity, dynamism, originality, and relevance of new and recent writing in French’.

Certainly, the collection features a diverse range of prose. Short stories rub shoulders with essays. There’s the transcript of a staged conversation Slimani had with newspaper director and writer Éric Fottorino. And the volume ends with an urgent piece in praise of politician and women’s rights champion Simone Veil, followed by a selection of quotations from her. It is the sort of amalgam that marketing bods at mainstream anglophone publishing houses would veto in a heartbeat.

Thank goodness, then, for indies and university presses. Because the curation of these superficially dissimilar pieces reveals striking threads running through Slimani’s thinking and creative practice.

Take her views on reading’s relationship to feminism. For women, as she explains in On Writing, her interview with Fottorino, time with books is essential because ‘a woman who reads is a woman who is emancipating herself’. With this in mind, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s call for a room of one’s own, claiming that this is important to allow space for reading as much as for writing.

This idea of the part reading plays in shaping women’s agency is demonstrated in the short story ‘Elsewhere’. Protagonist Rim finds books hold the key to her freedom. Her father ‘gorged her with stories’, giving her the world in printed form so that in the end she is confident enough to go out and meet it on her own terms.

Slimani’s reflections on her writing are particularly fascinating. Unabashed about discussing her own struggles – from an abandoned project to inhabit the minds of the Charlie Hebdo attackers to an unpublished first novel – she is disarmingly honest about the effort it requires: ‘There probably are such people, born writers destined for greatness, but I think there are a lot of people who just need to work hard, to meet the right person at the right time or need inspiration to strike at the right moment.’

Such frankness feels unfamiliar coming from such a lauded writer. In the English-speaking world, the fiction of the overnight success still has a powerful hold over the way we talk about books. (‘Ssh, don’t tell people that,’ a PR person muttered to a novelist friend of mine when they mentioned they had six failed manuscripts in their bottom drawer.)

But then, Slimani has always been a writer to challenge convention. Whether she’s penning gripping thrillers that win the highest literary honours (admittedly not such a departure in the Francophone world, where crime fiction more often receives critical acclaim), or exposing the hypocrisy underpinning the treatment of Moroccan women, she is unapologetic in her views, even when this risks controversy. Refusing to allow ‘a pseudo-respect for other cultures’ to muzzle her, she calls out injustice where she sees it.

Yet this forthrightness rests on a belief in the importance of togetherness and the joy of sharing space with those who think differently. The short piece ‘Our Gods and Our Homelands’ ends with an appeal for the France of 2016 to mirror the big Christmas meals Slimani remembers enjoying in Morocco as a child:

‘where everyone was welcome, where no one judged either the drunkenness of some or the outspokenness of others. Where the older generation did not dismiss the things the younger ones cared about, where everyone present chuckled at the blasphemers. Where at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was the awareness of how lucky we were to be together in a world where everything is hell-bent on dividing us.’

As we move into 2024, may our world take on more of the spirit of Slimani’s childhood Christmases. And may our reading, like this collection, be wide-ranging, ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging, engrossing and inspiring.

Thanks to everyone who continues to follow this blog, and whose comments, messages and suggestions keep fuelling and expanding my reading and writing adventures. Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a joyful New Year.

The Devil Is in the Detail and other writings by Leïla Slimani, translated from the French by Helen Vassallo (Liverpool University Press, 2023)

Book of the month: Bessora / Barroux

December 31, 2019 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

And so we come to the last day of 2019 and the final Book of the month of the 2010s, the decade in which reading changed my life.

From the start, this project has been about addressing personal blindspots and exploring what storytelling can do. In that spirit, this last review of the tenties, ventures into new territory for me: the world of graphic novels.

First, a confession: I’m not a very visual person. As a child, comics left me cold. I didn’t much like cartoons. The visions words conjured always seemed much more vivid than illustrations.

Recently, however, I got the chance to interview translator Sarah Ardizzone for the Royal Literary Fund, a wonderful charity of which I’m honoured to be a fellow. I’d been aware of Ardizzone’s work for many years because, among the more than 50 books she has translated, her work includes Faïza Guène’s powerful depiction of a Moroccan teenager’s life in a Parisian high-rise estate, Just Like Tomorrow, which was my French pick during my year of reading the world.

Indeed, as I said to Ardizzone during our discussion, her career has been characterised by translating diverse and non-mainstream voices, often through collaborations with representatives of a range of communities to capture the nuances of particular dialects or argots in French and find equivalencies in English.

Alpha: Abidjan to Gare du Nord is a prime example. The product of a collaboration between award-winning Belgium-born writer Bessora and French illustrator Barroux, the book reflects on the treacherous journeys of many of the undocumented migrants who have attempted to cross the Mediterranean to enter Europe in recent years, condensing extensive research into a single, striking account.

When I spoke to Ardizzone about it, she told me that working on graphic novels like this requires her to translate on another level, allowing the pictures to dictate the palette or moodboard of the words she uses. Following her lead, I am using some of the pictures from the book to direct my review.

The novel follows title character Alpha as he sells his business and sets out to travel to the Gare du Nord in Paris, where he believes he will meet his wife and son. Although the journey only takes a matter of hours by plane, he knows it will be somewhat longer by land and sea. As such, he travels light.

To reflect this, illustrator Barroux, who is known for using strict constraints in his work, opts to present his illustrations as though they are sketches done with felt-tip pens in a cheap exercise book Alpha has taken with him. Mostly black and white, with occasional splashes of colour when he has time for embellishments, they are stark and powerful, with a make-do, hurried air, as though the person drawing them can never be sure when he will next be on the move.

Ardizzone’s translation of Bessora’s words reflects this. The writing is largely functional and direct – in the manner of a journal – with occasional flights of fancy and poetic descriptions.

The depictions of many of Alpha’s fellow travellers are cases in point. There is Antoine from Cameroon, who is so set on making it to Spain to play for F.C. Barcelona that he is already wearing his football boots and gets up before sunrise to jog in the Sahara so as to stay in good physical form.

 

Equally powerful as these small, often funny, human details are the gaps and omissions. Take Abebi, a young woman from Lagos, whose health has been ruined by the physical risks she has been obliged to take to pay for her journey. The spare account of the toiletries she sets out in the corner of her room in one of the camps in an attempt to show potential customers that she is hygienic, coupled beautifully with the image fading into black, is more evocative than pages of detailed description could be.


And then there are the places where language breaks down altogether, as in the case of these pictures capturing Alpha’s terrifying crossing. At these points, with the abandonment of words, Barroux is able to take us into territory to which purely written works can only gesture.

As with all translations, compromises and reimaginings have been necessary to bring Alpha into English, giving this version a distinct character. According to Ardizzone, the most striking difference is the fact that, whereas the text was handwritten in the French original, it is typeset in the English. This change was necessitated by publisher Barrington Stoke’s focus on producing texts for readers with visual challenges and conditions such as dyspraxia. While it means that the English version lacks some of the original’s homespun feel, it does make the graphic novel accessible to more readers.

This can only be a good thing. Powerful, memorable, humane and shocking, this story deserves a large audience. It is the book that Ardizzone says she worked hardest to find a publishing home for in English and I can see why. I read it in one sitting and, generally non-visual though I am, many of its images will stay with me for a long time to come. Heartily recommended.

Alpha: Abidjan to Garde du Nord By Bessora & Barroux, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone (The Bucket List, 2016)

Wishing all literary explorers a very happy new year and many wonderful reads in the decade ahead. With thanks for your ongoing curiosity, enthusiasm and support! 

Book of the month: Lydie Salvayre

February 27, 2017 By in Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

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This is the third French book that I have featured on this blog. It is also the third book by an immigrant or child of immigrants to that nation.

Indeed, when I came to think about where to pigeonhole this review in my country-by-country list of titles, I hesitated. Although Lydie Salvayre was born in France and writes in French, the subject matter of her Goncourt Prize-winning novel, Cry, Mother Spain – which centres around the 1930s Spanish civil war – makes a strong case for the work being considered at least partly as belonging to that nation.

This ambiguity is fitting. Given that the dark side of nationalism drives much of the action in this book –which fuses together history, imagination, quotes from source material and the recollections of Salvayre’s Spanish mother (crossing genre boundaries as much as straddling borders) – it seems right that the narrative resists categorisation by country. Just as its central characters – teenage Montse, her ideological pro-Anarchist brother José and his bourgeois rival Diego – agonise and clash over the sort of Spain they want to live in, so the story that contains them challenges and questions its own identity.

Indeed, though the novel (for want of a better word) is rooted in the events that led up to the start of Franco’s dictatorship, much of this book resonates across the decades. Many readers will find uncomfortable parallels in the chilling way that the presentation of events is manipulated by those in power. We can sympathise with the narrator’s observation that what she discovers in her research stirs ‘fears of seeing today’s bastards revive the noxious ideas [she] thought had been put to rest a long time ago’.

Her 90-year-old mother puts it more bluntly. When asked if Diego’s manipulative speeches to the villagers made him sound like the politicians of today, she replies ‘They’re all the same, […] crooks the lot of them.’

This irreverence, which runs beneath much of the narrative and erupts into humour surprisingly frequently, is one of the things that make the novel a joy to read. There is a delicious archness to Salvayre’s depiction of the hypocrisy of many of the minor characters. The prime example is the pious hypochondriac doña Pura, who bestows her favours ‘with a sort of Christian sweetness thick with threat’.

In addition, the playful fusion of French and Spanish in Montse’s speech makes for some marvellous moments. Translator Ben Faccini must be congratulated for the way he has reflected this ‘cross-bred, trans-Pyrenean language’ in English. As an example, here’s Montse on the throwaway comment that first awoke her to injustice when at the age of 15 she went to interview for a position as a maid and the prospective employer remarked approvingly that she seemed quite humble:

‘For me it’s an insult, a patada in the arse, a kick in the culo, it makes me leap ten metros within my own head, it jolts my brain which had been slumbering for more than fifteen years.’

Salvayre is a psychiatrist and her insight into the workings of the human brain shows. Both in moments of humour and during the narrative’s many darker passages, she delineates the shifts in thinking that steer characters from one course to another, trap them into actions and render certain outcomes inevitable.

Her ability to imagine her way into the thought processes of the diverse characters she portrays is what makes the book such a triumph. At its root, is an awareness of the common humanity that binds us across centuries, borders and historical moments – of the fact that, much as we might like to imagine otherwise, human nature remains the same far more than it alters. In this, Cry, Mother Spain is at once a warning and a rallying call: we are all people, it proclaims. We are all touching and full of marvels and vulnerable to the same delusions that have ensnared so many before us.

Or, as Salvayre’s compatriots might say, plus ça change.

Cry, Mother Spain (Pas pleurer) by Lydie Salvayre, translated from the French by Ben Faccini (MacLehose Press, 2016)

Photo: Antifascist Committee Stamp, Spanish Civil War by Joseph Morris on flickr.com

WITmonth pick #4: Abnousse Shalmani

September 12, 2016 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

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There can be few more striking juxtapositions than the one found in the title of Abnousse Shalmani’s memoir Khomeini, Sade and Me. Indeed, it’s unlikely that the names of the ultra-conservative founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the notorious French aristocrat who penned some of the most violent and explicit literature ever published have ever found themselves staring at each other over a comma before.

The jarring effect of the title is entirely fitting, however, for it encapsulates the gulf that its author has crossed in the course of her life – a feat that forms the basis of this, her first book. Jumping from her childhood to her present-day existence, as well as to many incidents in between, the narrative records the reasons for and consequences of Shalmani’s atheist family’s decision to leave Iran for France a few years after the 1979 revolution. In so doing, it provides a framework for the writer to set out and interrogate the conflicting forces that shaped her, as well as to explore the immigrant experience, and build passionate arguments for equality and free expression.

The controversy inherent in the title is reflected on every page. This is an angry book and Shalmani pulls no punches in pillorying Khomeini and the fundamentalist men and women – dubbed ‘Beards’ and ‘Crows’ – who champion a creed to which she cannot subscribe. Many of her arguments, such as her vehement opposition to Muslim women wearing the veil, make for challenging reading – particularly in light of France’s recent burkini scandal.

Shalmani is well aware of this. For many, she writes, she will be ‘just a woman that comes off as a racist when she fears for the future of other women’, yet she will not give ground in the face of those for whom ‘open-mindedness is just a way of washing their hands of the matter’. Indeed, she makes no attempt to help her case or soften her words, thinking nothing of dismissing those who disagree as ‘idiots’.

The reasons for Shalmani’s vehemence are two-pronged and have their roots in the men featured in the title of her book. On the one hand, there is the extreme suffering that she and her family went through when their values clashed with those of their homeland’s new regime; for Shalmani this plays out particularly strongly in gender issues and the attempt to police women’s bodies not just in Iran but throughout the world because ‘each culture has its own women’s prison’. On the other hand, there is the ‘divine Marquis’, whose writings remade her and changed her thinking for good.

The most extraordinary passages are those in which Shalmani writes about her encounters with libertine literature – which she accessed first, surprisingly, with the help of her father who ‘firmly believed that there is no crime worse than censorship’. When writing about how reading Sade’s scenes of unparalleled depravity made her fearless and free in her thinking, staunch in her defence of free expression, and exhilarated about what words can do to expand horizons and change minds, she is magnificent. (Indeed, she is a much bolder reader than I am: I once opened The 120 Days of Sodom in a bookshop and had to put it back on the shelf after a paragraph because I was feeling sick…)

With such a literary hero, it is small wonder that Shalmani does not shrink from causing offence and expressing herself as powerfully as she can. This does her work a disservice occasionally. At points, it makes her writing seem as dogmatic as the teachings of those she attacks. In addition, the fervour with which she expresses love and admiration for her adopted country, France, can sometimes sound a little naive.

On the whole, though, her passion is compelling. Many readers will not agree with all she says and some may be offended, but that is, in a way, the point: this book is a reminder that outrage should be part of the reading experience. It demonstrates that words ought to stretch, challenge and unsettle us. And it is a stark demonstration of the terrible things that can happen when there is no space left in which to question or offend.

Khomeini, Sade and Me (Khomeini, Sade et moi) by Abnousse Shalmani, translated from the French by Charlotte Coombe (World Editions, 2016)

Picture: (TEDxParis Nov2015) Abnousse Shalmani (2) by Olivier Ezratty on flickr.com

Book of the month: Fariba Hachtroudi

February 23, 2016 By in Book of the month, Middle East, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

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A few weeks ago, I had a rather dramatic flying experience. Travelling from New York to a mystery destination (which will be revealed in the next World bookshopper post), I ended up having to take three flights in place of one when my plane was unable to land because of high winds. We were sent back to JFK and flew back for a second (successful) landing attempt later the same day.

Spending seven hours doing a journey that you had expected to take less than two is rarely fun. Luckily for me, the silver lining in this – rather turbulent – cloud was that I had an excellent novel with me that managed to keep me enthralled for much of the journey. The book was The Man Who Snapped His Fingers, the English-language debut from French-Iranian author Fariba Hachtroudi – and it impressed me so much that when I finally got off that third flight, not only shaken by the journey but very much stirred by what I’d read, I knew that I wanted to tell you about it.

Premises don’t come much more gripping than this one: years after a brief encounter in a torture chamber, a former senior official of a tyrannical Theological Republic and a woman who was one of the regime’s myriad victims come face to face. This time, the power balance is reversed. The former colonel is in the final stages of a last-ditch attempt to secure asylum in a northern European state; the erstwhile victim is his translator, and his only hope of winning the visa that will save his life.

As the translation angle might suggest, this is a book about words and storytelling, and the power they have to free, enslave and condemn. As the narrative alternates between the perspectives of the asylum seeker and the translator, gradually revealing their troubled and intertwined histories, we witness the way that human beings construct accounts in an attempt to establish and preserve their identities. With the drip, drip, drip of what happened comes the erosion of the concept of objective truth.

The writing, translated by Alison Anderson, ably reflects and develops this theme. The descriptions are sharp, vivid and brutal. Calling to mind some of the best passages of works such as Jérôme Ferrari’s Where I Left my Soul and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop, they stretch language on the rack of human experience, testing its limits to contain and express suffering and trauma.

As a result, this is not a book for the fainthearted. It is also not a book for readers who prioritise plot over substance.

When I started it shortly after take-off, I half expected the narrative to pursue a sensationalist line, with the translator exploiting her power to twist and shape the asylum seeker’s story as a means of exacting revenge. In fact, Hachtroudi’s choices are much more interesting than that and the novel is much richer and more thought-provoking as a result. Instead of events, ideas take centre stage – from the ways we construct ourselves, to conflicting notions of love.

This may mean that the The Man Who Snapped His Fingers is too diffuse and slow-moving for some tastes. Indeed, Europa Editions has done well not to jump on the thriller marketing bandwagon with this one. (The grabby premise is only loosely described in the jacket copy, with the emphasis placed instead on the sifting of the past that the character’s encounter provokes – a much more accurate reflection of the book than a campaign focusing on the opening hook would probably achieve.)

All the same, from where I was sitting (in seat 17C or thereabouts), the slower pace and looser-than-anticipated plot only heightened the novel’s appeal. I was gripped, through three rather bumpy attempted landings, a return flight, an hour’s wait and yet another take-off. I’m not sure many books would stand up to such a test.

The Man Who Snapped His Fingers (Le Colonel et l’appât) by Fariba Hactroudi, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2016)

France: a fine line

July 19, 2012 By in Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 18 Comments

I heard about this book through a class I’ve been attending on free speech and translation, run by English PEN. The final session was set to involve a visit from translator Sarah Ardizzone (née Adams), who was going to talk about how she worked with writer Faïza Guène’s heavily inflected, Moroccan-street-slang-laden French to create the English version of the novel Just Like Tomorrow.

The work piqued my interest for another reason too: having read Leïla Marouane’s The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris for my Algerian book, I was curious to see how another novel set in the French capital’s North African community but this time written by a French-born author might compare to it. Would reading this book help me to draw that ever more elusive line between where one country’s literature stops and another’s begins?

Just Like Tomorrow follows 15-year-old Doria as she copes with life on the city’s grim Paradise estate. Her father has recently left her mother for a younger wife in Morocco and the two women now live on the bread line, depending on the income from Doria’s mother’s precarious cleaning job and their own abilities to make do and mend. Caught between the disapproval of their conservative neighbours and the shallow complacency of a series of social workers, Doria has nothing but her wit and verve to keep her from becoming just another statistic on the French authorities’ books.

Sadly, Sarah Ardizzone was unable to make the class, which was a shame because it would have been fascinating to hear about the process by which she converted Guène’s prose into a sort of light Jafaican (or Multicultural London English as it’s more formally known). Translating dialects can be tricky at the best of times – and a questionable decision can be very distracting – but here Doria’s narrative voice, peppered with ‘innit’s, ‘you get me’s and ‘back in the day’s, is thoroughly engaging and believable. The only sticking points come occasionally in the form of cultural references, which veer between British romance author Barbara Cartland (unlikely to be known to many urban teenagers), TV programme The Price is Right and French gameshow Fort Boyard, as though final decisions about the framework of Doria’s translated world haven’t quite been made – although these may have been carried over from the original.

The success of the voice is central to the book, because it is Doria’s wry, fearless, fresh vision and killer putdowns that make the novel. So much so, that I’m struggling to choose which of the many great oneliners to share with you. There’s the cashier who is ‘so flat you could fax her’, the absent father now known to his daughter as ‘Mr How-Big-Is-My-Beard’, and, perhaps my favourite of all, Doria’s succinct explanation of the Arabic term ‘insh’Allah’:

‘She played that wild card, AKA ‘insh’Allah’. It doesn’t mean yes or no. The proper translation is “God willing”. Thing is, you never find out if God’s willing or not…’

The humour, however, never clouds our vision of the hardships Doria and her mother face. If anything, it enhances the picture by making us indignant that such vibrant individuals should be forced to endure the sneers of snobs and racists, the harsh treatment of shady employers and the patronisation of officials. Guène brings this home through a series of small, yet telling scenes – such as Doria’s struggle to scrape enough money together to pay for sanitary towels at the local shop’s checkout and her recollection of the day she unwittingly went to school in a second-hand pyjama top, bearing the English phrase ‘Sweet Dreams’.

Does her perspective on Paris differ from the attitude of Marouane’s protagonist to the city? Well, perhaps, in as much as he might be described as being on the fringes of French culture looking longingly in at what he thinks he sees, while Doria is very much in the thick of the less-than-perfect reality.

Such questions seem to pale into insignificance, however, in the face of the fact that this is simply a fabulous, and thoroughly engaging book. Its portrait of a divided society, full of contradictions, tensions and hope will enthrall, challenge and resonate with readers – wherever they are in the world.

Just Like Tomorrow (Kiffe kiffe demain) by Faïza Guène, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone (Definitions, 2006)