Do we know our parents? Do we even want to know them? “Basically, children are never interested in what their parents were like,” the Franco-Moroccan novelist and Islamologist Rachid Benzine tells us in THE silences of fathers. After learning of the death of his father in France, a worker originally from Morocco, a concert pianist returns to Trappes, the small town in the southwest suburbs of Paris where he grew up. Long estranged from this father walled in silence (“My mother was his voice”, the narrator will say), the man will discover a box of audio cassettes that his father had recorded between 1965 and 2006 for his parents. illiterate. He will meet this man, trace some of his old friends and discover his broken love story with a French woman whom his own father had forbidden him to marry. The reliable friend, the model worker and the music lover will gradually cover the silence. This silence against which the narrator had constructed himself.
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