Reading to Make Sense of Tragedy: "Nous Sommes Tous Charlie"

In the wake of the slaughter of a dozen people in Paris, ten of whom worked for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, by Islamic terrorists yelling "God is great!", I have been relieved to see how peaceful -- and moving -- reactions have been. But while this horrific attack is clearly the action of a lunatic fringe, it is one of a string of similar assaults, and has provoked a debate over whether this is simply extremist violence that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening within France (or the Netherlands, or other Western European nations). On the other hand, some commenters have also taken note of the fact that the terrorists spoke fluent French, and that France has a large and too often marginalized population, some second and third generation French citizens, who are descendants of immigrants from former French colonies in Muslim nations in North Africa and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Study after study has shown they face discrimination in the job market and in housing -- they can even find it hard to open a bank account.

But let's not venture down this rabbit hole. Instead, I think it's time to take a step back. Because there is one bright spot here, other than the tremendous reaffirmation for free speech and other Enlightenment values on the part of all French people and an absence of any backlash against Paris's immigrant community, outside the city's péripherique highway. That is that the fact that the decades-long tensions between these communities have produced some great novels, many of which Europa Editions has translated and brought to the attention of English language readers. Here are a handful of the highlights.

The first of these is geographically on target -- The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. To say that Mohamed, author Leila Marouane's protagonist, is conflicted, would be putting it mildly. On the one hand, at the age of 40, he lives with his mother and younger brother in the Algerian neighborhood of Saint Ouen in Paris (better known to tourists as home to a great flea market). On the other hand, he also has "Gallicized" his name; he ensures his skin is pale and that his hair is straight enough that he isn't mistaken for an Arab in real life, so unlike a lot of the guys he knew growing up, he's got a great job. But what Marouane is doing is painting a picture of what it's like for a man in today's France when identities collide in immigrant communities. Which is the real Mohamed? Is he the "Momo" that his community knows, or "Basile Tocquard", the new Gallic identity he has adopted and that allows him to "pass" and be accepted by broader French society in a way that Mohamed never would?


Momo's identity crisis comes to a head when he discovers his dream apartment and sets out to build a dream life in it, complete with (at last!) losing his virginity to what he hopes will be an endless stream of non-Algerian women. "All that remained for me to do was to go over the wall, with the firm intention of becoming an individual who decides and charts his life as a Westerner, on a full-time basis, with every right thereto pertaining." But while he fantasizes about the real estate agent who sells him the apartment, many of the other women he encounters actually turn out to be Algerian, and he is haunted by another the reader never quite encounters, an Algerian novelist named Loubna Minbar. Like life itself, maybe Momo's emancipation isn't going to be quite as straightforward as he had hoped?

The novel starts out as a straightforward chronicle of the adventures of Momo/Basile, only to take on an almost hallucinatory tone, leaving the reading questioning the narrator's reliability and pondering the havoc that discrimination can play on a psyche. A bonus? It's translated by Alison Anderson, who does an amazing job capturing not just the literal translation but providing an individual 'feel' for each novel she translates.

The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal is another dark novel set partly in the banlieues/suburbs of Paris. Sansal, an Algerian-born writer, has had his works banned in his native country since 2006, and, like Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists, is an equal opportunity critic, although he doesn't work in satire, but uses much darker material altogether.

This novel is so far Sansal's only title to be available here, although as of next week (!), Bloomsbury USA will be releasing Harraga, set in Algeria itself. (I've got it ordered already.) The focus of this book is the diaries of two brothers, Rachel (Raschid Helmut) and his much younger brother, Malrich. On Rachel's death, Malrich discovers that his German father and Algerian mother also are dead -- victims of a massacre in Algeria's bloody civil war between the military and fundamentalist Islamists. Reading Rachel's diary, he unearths uncomfortable truths about his father's youth in the SS -- truths that Rachel found unbearable. But while Rachel found history trapped him, Malrich's own efforts to understand and make sense of his past focus on his present life in one of the Parisian housing projects that are "home" to large numbers of Tunisians, Moroccans and Algerians and others trying to carve out lives for themselves in a largely unwelcoming country.

Malrich already is aghast at the success that radical Islamists are having in radicalizing his community and sees uncanny parallels between the Nazis of his father's generation and the fundamentalists. Sansal's strength lies in his ability to deliver two parallel tales in utterly different and convincing voices: that of a mature man whose world collapses, and that of an adolescent who must find a path for himself that escapes the paradigm of victim and oppressor. Malrich's tone is that of a young guy chatting to his friends; Rachel's is more sober and analytical; bother are utterly convincing. Who is guilty? What does it mean to resist? These are weighty topics and Sansal does an excellent job of engaging with them.

If you need or want a lighter approach to these very weighty and important topics, you'll want to turn to the works of another Algerian-born author, Amara Lakhous. Lakhous, who until very recently has lived and worked in Italy, has written a series of three elegant and often hilarious novels set in Italian cities and focusing on the motley groups of migrants who end up sharing neighborhoods and apartment buildings. Divorce Islamic Style is a slyly funny look at a particular corner of Rome, Viale Marconi, known as "Little Cairo". One of its main characters, Christian, is from Sicily -- but he speaks perfect Arabic and can pass for an Arab. So when the government officials and cops get antsy about the possibility of some kind of terrorist plot brewing, it makes sense that they dispatch Christian (as Issa) to figure out what is going on. There, his path crosses that of Sofia, or Saffia, wife of an immigrant from Egypt. She's delighted with life in Rome -- and young and beautiful. Her husband? Not so much. Trained as an architect, he's stuck working as a pizza chef, and keeps getting so frustrated and fed up that he'll come home and argue with her, to the point that he'll yell "I divorce you!" in the heat of the moment. Whoops... if this happens a third time, she'll be free -- and remarriage won't be very easy at all...

Lakhous's other novels also tackle what happens when people from disparate culture backgrounds try to coexist, with Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazzo Vittoria making the point that for someone in Rome, a guy who shows up from Sicily or Calabria can be just as much (or more) of an outsider as someone who is a migrant from North Africa. Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet even had a reviewer at the Philadelphia Inquirer questioning whether Lakhous was an Italian Camus, writing novels trying to address the 'new Italy'.

The sudden rise of multiculturalism in Europe in the second half of the 20th century -- and the fact that in many countries, in practice, multiculturalism has taken the form of immigration from Muslim nations (in Britain, from Pakistan and Bangladesh; in Belgium and France, from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Mali, among other countries; in Germany, 'guest workers' from Turkey) -- has created all kinds of new tensions. Whether those tensions are connected to these horrific acts of terrorism, there's a risk that members of these communities will have to deal with an upsurge in exclusionary nationalism.

Which makes it worthwhile to listen to these voices, as we mourn the Charlie Hebdo tragedy.

Europa Challenge: Algerians in Europe

By accident rather than design, I ended up reading two books published by Europa Editions by Algerian writers with similar themes: both deal, at least in part, with the experience of emigrants from the "bled" -- the hinterland of countries like Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia -- in contemporary Europe, specifically France and Italy. While the books couldn't be more different in nature, both shed light on the struggle that surrounds European efforts to develop a "multicultural" tolerance.

The Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, takes the lightest of approaches to this weighty subject, veering occasionally to the comedic elements: even as those residents from other parts of Italy (who despise the foreigners in their midst in the apartment building in Rome that is the heart of the story) look down on each other as being non-Italian -- supporters of the wrong football team, perhaps, or from Naples. The only individual whom each of them believes he or she can clearly see and admire is Amedeo. And yet it's Amedeo who seems to be at the heart of the police questioning that elicits the "testimonies" from the apartment building's residents that make up the bulk of the book (interspersed with diary-style comments from the absent Amedeo.) Because it seems that Amedeo is the prime suspect in the death of an unlamented hooligan named "The Gladiator", an Italian, to be sure, but one who few residents liked half as much as they admire Amedeo. So much do they admire Amedeo, in fact, that they universally reject the idea that he's an immigrant himself, whatever they are told.

The individual tales are poignant and hilarious; the commentary from Amedeo that follows each shows the ways in which individuals deceive themselves by sharing with the reader the details of his interactions with the character in question, and the "truth" of the matter. Their mutual misunderstandings come to a head in conflicts around the use of the elevator that they must share -- all except Amedeo, who fears the enclosed space and opts to take the stairs. ( Benedetta, the concierge, interprets that as a sign of consideration for her personally, in one of the typical misunderstandings.) And it is in the elevator that the body of the Gladiator has been found...  Only toward the end of this novella do we learn the truth about Amedeo himself, something so dark that even the murder of the Gladiator seems anticlimactic. This was a humorous, wry and sardonic look at the way humans view the "other", and at our willingness to break down these barriers and make exceptions to our rules on occasion. Lakhous has unveiled the truths that lie behind prejudice and preconceptions of all kinds. 4.2 stars.

The German Mujahid is an altogether darker vision of the relationship between immigrants from North Africa and the French who accommodate them only reluctantly in their midst. Malrich Schiller is the son of a German father and Algerian mother, now living in one of those housing estates on the outskirts of Paris that the rest of the world hears about only in context of riots and rebellion. Malrich, however, has a first-hand view of the way that Islamists are seizing control of the estate and creating a nation within a nation -- a world that has as little tolerance for those who are non-compliant as did Nazi Germany. And that's a comparison that Malrich is forced to come to grips with on a personal level, when his elder brother Rachel (Rachid Helmut) dies, and Malrich inherits his diary and their father's personal effects -- including SS medals from World War II. On their father's death in a remote Algerian community -- possibly at the hands of Islamists -- Rachel had initially seen him as a victim, only to realize that he may have been a perpetrator of a different and yet related horror. After exploring his father's history, Rachel finds his conclusions impossible to live with; Malrich, by contrast, takes a different path...

Sansal's strength is his ability to deliver two parallel tales in utterly different and utterly convincing voices -- that of a mature man whose world collapses, and that of an adolescent who must decide on a path for himself that escapes the paradigm of victim and oppressor. Malrich's tone is that of a young guy chatting to his friends; Rachel's the more sober and analytical; both are utterly convincing. Who is guilty? And what does it mean to resist? These are weighty topics; Sansal does an excellent job of dealing with them to the extent that any author can. 4.3 stars, definitely recommended.

Europa Challenge: "I'm a policeman!"

That's what Commissario De Luca keeps insisting. After all, he has finally managed to transfer from the special political police to the regular police in the final days of Mussolini's fascist regime at the opening of Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli (published by Europa Editions, and read for my Europa Challenge.). But it's early 1945, and the Allied troops are approaching and the partisans gaining courage.

Against that backdrop, De Luca is called on to investigate the murder of a man close to the regime, with powerful friends and powerful enemies. Everyone seems to have a stake in the outcome -- or rather, in a particular outcome -- but De Luca stubbornly insists on continuing his quest for the real culprit, even as bodies pile up along the way. There's an intriguing twist at the end of this gritty, noir-ish and brief crime novel, one that makes me wonder how De Luca will fare in the next two books of Lucarelli's trilogy, which I'll certainly be reading.

This is a quick read, and an intriguing one. The idea of the stubborn cop pursuing "truth" even when those above him make it clear they don't want to hear it is hardly new (after all, I've just finished reading the very good novel, The Pericles Commission, by Gary Corby, which puts its hero in exactly the same kind of position.) But the writing and translation are both excellent, and the setting is almost perfectly designed for this kind of conflict: a cop who literally tries not to hear the sounds of torture when he revisits his old office in search of information.

A good start to the Europa Challenge, and a recommended book to those looking for a slightly different kind of mystery. I've rated it 3.8 stars; the only reason it isn't higher is that I prefer books that devote a bit more time and attention to character development, and while Lucarelli does accomplish a lot in a relatively skimpy number of pages, the book still left me wanting more.

What's Life Without a Challenge?

One of the publishers I noted a day or two ago as being one of those that has an uncanny ability for generating a disproportionate quantity of "I gotta read it!" and even "I gotta buy it -- NOW" books is Europa Editions. So much so, that when they announced they were launching the "Europa Challenge", I decided that I'd have to join in.

The challenge is to read (no hardship at all) a number of Europa titles (again, no hardship) between July 1 and the end of 2011. If I read 4, I win the title of Europa Ami; if I hit 7, I rise to become a Europa Haver (Hebrew for 'friend') and if I hit 14, I'll become an Europa Amante. Since I'm feeling pro-Italian this week, I'll opt for the Amante title, which will mean I'll have to devour about two or three Europa titles every month. Eh, nessun problema; possa fare questo! And just for the fun of it, I'll try to win the "Passport Holder" designation (by reading books from different countries, published in different languages) and will ponder becoming a "perpetual" reader -- in other words, to read all the Europa titles.

So far, I've read A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse; Muriel Barbery's two novels; In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut and the books that I've reviewed here by Kazimierz Brandys, Anna Gavalda and Luis Sepulveda. I've got about four that I have purchased but that linger unread, and a few more I've obtained from the library, so all I have to do now is decide whether to kick off with Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon, Heliopolis by James Scudamore or Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli. Decisions, decisions...

I'll be cross-posting my reading on the Europa Editions challenge blog here -- and if you feel like it, why not read along or join the challenge for yourself?

Happy reading!