It is a story that could have been that of the mother of Nina Bouraoui, a Frenchwoman who married an Algerian who studied in France and with whom she went to live in Algeria. The narrator, Michèle Akli, wonders in her notebooks, written in Algiers at the end of the 1970s, about the future of her son – should she send him to France when he is old enough to enter the university? Which country and which nationality to choose?
These “Polaroid photographs” fly over the dreary daily life, through her thoughts, of a woman her neighbors nicknamed “the sad Frenchwoman”. Her feelings have changed: towards this country which will one day become her “tomb”, towards this life she no longer wants, towards this husband she no longer loves as on the first day, towards this son whose new friendship she envies. . She reflects on her relationship with femininity in this “virile capital”, this place where, hidden behind her glasses, her hats, her loose clothes, she no longer feels like a woman; but also to the rivalry of mothers, to the failure of his marriage as the continuation of the failure of the history of their two countries. To distract herself from her loneliness and idleness, she invents obsessions and drowns in them. Selected among the finalists for the Femina Prize, this vaporous novel by the author ofHostages boldly probes the themes of identity, exile and the relationship to oneself in a sort of universal metaphor on the impossibility of being at peace with oneself.
Satisfaction
Nina Bouraoui
JC Lattès
288 pages