Leïla SlimaniLe pays des autres: La guerre, la guerre, la guerre

Abstract

alternative reading of the novel. Lastly, Emre’s essay uses her (somewhat awkward) correspondence with Ferrante to muse on strategies of authorship, asserting that Ferrante ’s absence, far from being irrelevant to her work, has in fact “resurrected a powerful, almost transcendent, myth of the author as removed from the realities of time and space.” All along, a studied informality underlies these pages, carefully crafted and unafraid to draw as much from personal experience as from the pantheon of literary criticism. In a way, readers interested in probing the sociocultural context of the Neapolitan novels might want to look elsewhere . The Ferrante Letters does not abide by traditional standards of scholarship; it is not weighed down by hefty footnotes, and it does not advance a unified claim. But neither is it interested in doing any of these things. Its energies lie elsewhere, in the development of a critical feminist praxis intent on rethinking models of textual engagement—in this, it is much closer to its object of study than a traditional academic monograph would be. What Chihaya , Emre, Hill, and Richards have created might cater more to the cultivated reader of Ferrante than the scholar, yet academics stand to learn much from as daring and novel a form of criticism as this one. Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar City University of New York Leïla Slimani Le pays des autres: La guerre, la guerre, la guerre Paris. Gallimard. 2020. 365 pages. IN 2016 LEÏLA SLIMANI won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious annual literary prize, for her novel Chanson douce (see WLT, May 2017, 104). Slimani’s new novel is mostly set in her native Morocco and spans the period between the end of the Second World War and the country’s independence in 1956. The two main characters are Amine, a Moroccan soldier from Meknes who is serving in the French army during the war, and Mathilde, a young Frenchwoman who endured the rigors of living in occupied Alsace during her adolescence . The two fall in love, marry, and settle near Meknes, where Amine owns a plot of land that he plans to develop into a prosperous farm using modern methods. Mathilde is thus transplanted to a country that has been a French protectorate since 1912, and where the struggle to obtain independence will quickly intensify and lead to a wave of violence. For the young couple, difficulties arise almost immediately. Amine’s relatively to value most is fiction’s ability to give us a new view on our reality by making things visible that we don’t typically perceive or think about and by bringing forth the communicative weight of silence. Her discussions of music are particularly elucidating, as she explicates the ways in which music informs how she thinks about narrative structure, repetition, rhythm, and silence in her own fiction. In part 3, titled “Society,” Erpenbeck turns our attention to the social and political importance of rendering visible that which is typically invisible, that which is typically suppressed in the collective consciousness . Here, she focuses on the plight of refugees in Europe today. The essay “How Are You? Good?” is an obituary for Bashir Zakaryau, a Nigerian refugee whom she came to know while writing Go, Went, Gone. In this essay, she honors the life and achievements of Zakaryau, who suffered a harrowing voyage to Europe, was kept poor and socially invisible by the politics and bureaucracy that govern immigration in Europe, and who used his hard-won autonomy to help other refugees before he died. She endeavors to show us not how Europeans saw him—in fact, they did not—but rather, how he was seen by those he helped. The title of the final contribution , “Blind Spots,” emphasizes the theme of imperception. This address, delivered in 2018 at the University of Oklahoma as part of that year’s Puterbaugh Lit Fest, thus makes a fitting end to the collection. In “Blind Spots,” Erpenbeck draws on her own experience as an East German whose state no longer exists to address the plight of refugees, both those from Latin America being kept out of the United States and those from the Middle East and Africa being...