The Art of Losing

Author's name: Alice Zeniter

Algeria, from which Naima's family hails, was for a long time merely a backdrop, rarely attracting the young girl's interest. Yet everything about French society, as a society beset by questions of identity, wanted to bring her back to her roots. But what connection could there possibly be to a family story she had never been told? Her grandfather, Ali, a Kabyle mountain man, died before she had a chance to ask him why history had made him a Harki. Her grandmother, "Yemma," may have the answer, but not in a language Naima understands. As for Hamid, her father, who arrived in France in the summer of 1962 and was hastily erected in transit camps, he no longer spoke of the Algeria of his childhood. How could she revive a country of silence? Through a moving and bold narrative portrait, Alice Zeniter recounts the fate of successive generations of a family imprisoned by a stubborn past, a fate that shifts between France and Algeria. A powerful novel about the freedom to be beyond one's heritage and beyond intimate or social constraints.