Fortunately for us, when the time came to face the imminent death of her father, who entered palliative care on May 28, 2022 to die there the following June 7, Nina Bouraoui found nothing better than words. “I know that keeping a pain to yourself, not expressing it, runs the risk of it resurfacing years later, confusing because it was unexpected. » By drawing on the ordeal, the writer gave birth to Noblemanthe story of agony, certainly, but which celebrates life, the one that was, the one that will be, and above all this bond which is not about to break between a father and his daughter.
With this nineteenth book, which appears thirty-three years later The forbidden voyeur, a first novel striking in its relevance and beauty, the French author of Algerian origin, born in 1967, adds a precious stone to what she calls her “love edifice”. Note that at the same time its publisher, JC Lattès, published The desire for an endless novela collection of portraits, short stories and columns published in the press or elsewhere between 1992 and 2022.
One could believe in a logbook, a series of snapshots, so many reflections triggered by the daily life of a woman who is preparing to lose her father and who is trying to come to terms with this terrible idea. But the book, 250 pages divided into brief chapters, is much more constructed, ambitious and crucial than that. Every word is necessary and there are many sentences that illuminate with style and depth one or other of the delicate stages of mourning. “My father’s room is the place of a dramaturgy, each of us competes for a place, a gesture, a word, obsessed by the desire to be loved by the one who stands on the threshold of darkness. »
In a heartfelt, but not elegiac, tribute, it is about the life of his father, who was governor of the central bank of Algeria, his marriage to a Breton woman in 1962 and his installation in Paris in the early 1980s, while an increase in violence already foreshadows the civil war which will break out in Algeria in 1992. The narrator revisits in a very evocative manner her memories of childhood and adolescence, starting with the discovery of her homosexuality. The father she describes seems secretive and often absent, but always, in all situations, his daughter’s ally. “I promise to honor your name that I bear – and which means storyteller in Arabic – by continuing to write, to build book after book this edifice that I called the edifice of love; as you know, the word Love only has boundaries if we want to give it one. »
The imminence of his father’s death mainly leads Bouraoui to take inventory, to take stock, to revisit the significant episodes of his life, to name his friends and his loves. Two invaluable women also hold a special place: the Friend in Paris and A, the lover, in Aix. The father’s support is in some ways an opportunity: “ […] here I learn to accept the idea of my own death. » The frankness of the narrator, her lucidity, her sensitivity, her demands on herself, all this means that the story never descends into lament, that it never sinks into tears, and that it very much risks help many through their own bereavements.