Mémoires au soleil by Azouz Begag

Abstract

Hildyard’s focus is on her own personal understanding of her “second body.” She writes, “I need to find some places where real life and this global truth—the two bodies—come into one another,” and she is up front about her lack of advice for anyone else’s bodies. In this investigation , Hildyard interviews a number of people: butchers, wildlife investigators , geneticists, biologists. At one point she claims that “Since Darwin, we have known that species do not exist,” but of course that isn’t correct: evolution posits a common ancestor, not the absence of speciation . But The Second Body also questions whether individuals truly exist—can there really be a first body, since the animal body is always a symbiosis of many different organisms? (Recent research shows that our human cells are literally outnumbered by the nonhuman cells in our bodies.) For some of her sources, the eclipsing of the first body invokes a reaction of “horror”; yet on the other hand, for one of the biologists she interviews, it’s the individual’s capacity to act altruistically (in the second body) that is the most vexing. Hildyard’s erasure of individual bodies reminds me of the Gaia hypothesis: the biosphere itself, both living and nonliving parts, act like one organism to maintain the conditions for life on Earth. Our second bodies too often act as if they are apart from this biosphere, and Hildyard notes how even ecology textbooks’ language maintains this division. This book is at its best when she is writing most intimately—describing a local butcher’s work or the flood that destroyed her home. Though Hildyard doesn’t really reconcile her two bodies completely, the act of recognizing that they both exist is necessary and worthwhile. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Azouz Begag Mémoires au soleil Paris. Seuil. 2018. 184 pages. Ever since Le Gone du Chaâba (1986), Azouz Begag’s novels have been autobiographical , exploring his background as the child of impoverished Algerian immigrants in Lyon, France. Begag went on to become an economist, a novelist, and, from 2005 to 2007, a government minister. This novel is centered on his relationship with his elderly father, who is suffering from “la maladie d’Ali Zaïmeur.” This apparently flippant reference to Alzheimer’s disease is an indication of the tone of the narrative , which alternates between pathos and bemusement. The plot is extremely simple: the narrator must find his father, who has once again wandered off on foot, apparently seeking to return to the home of his youth in Algeria. He will finally find his confused father at the ironically named “Café du Soleil,” where other retired immigrant workers from North Africa—who are known as the Chibanis—gather to pass the time and occasionally tell stories about the old days. The narrator spends the rest of a rainy day at the rundown café, observing the interactions between the aged workingclass Chibanis while trying to reconnect emotionally with his ailing father. Begag intersperses the narrative with flashbacks to his own disappointing trip to Algeria, in search of his roots, to his attempts at reconstructing his family history , which includes a grandfather who fought and died for France during World War I. At the café, a sort of suspension of time and place occurs, as the narrator offers brief glimpses of the lives of the Chibanis. The differences in terms of social class and generations are especially highlighted by the anecdotes about his father, the illiterate construction worker who struggled to provide for his children and who encouraged them to excel at school. Begag, who eventually obtained a doctorate in economics, describes his attitude toward learning as an attempt at “revenge” against his father’s extremely hard lot in life, against the destiny of failure that could have been his as a result of social determinism. Toward the end of the narrative, he asks or prays for a reversal of his father’s grim medical destiny, for a miraculous cure that would restore his failing health and bring back his lost memories, perhaps through the use of “un eCloud, un eNuage.” The droll wistfulness of a cybernetic metaphor is typical of Begag’s...