from Alsace to Morocco

Leïla Slimani

Le parfum des fleurs la nuit

Le pays des autres

This June was the first time in too many years that I got to spend some time in France, so I had some catching up to do. In a bookshop at Nimes, I spotted a pair of paperbacks by Leila Slimani lying around on a table where they didn't belong, and as I loved her first novel, Dans le jardin de l'ogre (published in English as Adele), and generally have a soft spot for her, I read this as a sign and bought the pair unseen.

I read the slimmer one first, and it turned out to be an autobiographical sketch about an occasion when she agreed to spend a night locked into a museum in Venice and write about it. I mainly learned from this that she smokes too much, doesn't care much about visual arts, and had a grandmother from Alsace. As I had two grandparents from Alsace/Lorraine, I was intrigued and wanted to know more.

Luckily, the other book told me all about the Alsatian grandmother, albeit in fictionalised form. In the novel she's called Matilde and married a Moroccan soldier stationed near her home during the second world war, and followed him to his native country then still under French rule, but with calls for independence getting louder. Very much the type of book I want to read right now, making sense of our recent past and migration stories in an appealing format.

Ooh, and I hear there is a sequel too, called Regardez-nous danser. will have to get my hands on that (as soon as it comes out in paperback).

See also my twitter thread listing books I read in 2022.

PS Wikipedia names the real-life grandmother as Anne Ruetsch. My Alsatian grandparents were the son of Heinrich and Maria who fell in love in Stasbourg but then were forced to move to Dieuze (Lorraine), and the granddaughter of the stationmaster of Adamsweiler. Both lineages only came to the region after 1871, but Maria also had a much earlier Alsatian ancestor from Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, unfortunately called Paul Simon, which must be the most useless name for online searches one can imagine. Considering all of this, I'm now creating a tag for all things Alsatian.