Facing demons … Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph: Per Pejstrup
FICTION IN TRANSLATION
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen review – confessions of a literary outsider
The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency
Liz Jensen Wed 16 Oct 2019 09.00 BST
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or the four decades after the outbreak of the second world war, Tove Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities – dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict – were constantly at war. While always the central protagonist in her dispatches from the frontline of her own life, she never pretended to be the heroine. Which makes it unsurprising that in an era with an appetite for autofiction, her mordant, vibrantly confessional autobiographical work should be experiencing a revival.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is a celebrity writer in her native Netherlands. Photograph: PR
FICTION IN TRANSLATION
Ten of the best new books in translation
From a Dutch family saga to a murdered witch in Mexico, these novels will transport you from a bleak tourist town at the North Korean border to Tblisi and beyond
Marta Bauselles Saturday 23 November 2019
The Discomfort of the Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison (Faber)
By the time it hits UK shelves in March, thousands of copies of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut will already have been sold around Europe and beyond. A celebrity writer in her native Netherlands, the 28-year-old also works on a dairy farm, and the novel is set on one, too. Centring on a young girl whose brother dies in an ice-skating accident, it takes the reader on a haunting journey. Rijneveld is also an award-winning poet, which shows in her sensory language and the beautifully wild images that linger in the mind.
Pain by Zeruya Shalev, translated by Sondra Silverston (Other)
The Israeli writer is always incisive on the complexities of family and relationship dynamics, and her latest novel, published in the UK this month, focuses on the longing of old passions versus the dreads and comforts of domesticity. A decade after she is injured in a suicide bombing, two different kinds of pain return to Iris’s life: the physical trauma of that attack, and the love of her youth. Iris is weighed down by work and motherhood, and, as she begins an affair, Shalev plunges the reader into a whirlwind story of impossible choices.
Vernon Subutex 3 by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose)
The Vernon Subutex trilogy is “post-punk, post-morality, post-civilisation”. A satire of modern France, its protagonist, an antihero of antiheroes and a homeless guru of sorts, is the former owner of a Parisian record store, “trapped in the last century”, and on a quest to uncover the secrets of a dead pop star, his friend Alex Bleach. Books one and two are already out in the UK, and volume three will hit the shelves in 2020.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES is a writer and filmmaker. Her first novel, Baise-Moi was published in 1992 and adapted for film in 2000. She is the author of over fifteen further novels, including Apocalypse Baby (2010) and Bye Bye Blondie (2004), and the autobiographical work, King Kong Theory (2006). She won the Prix de Flore in 1998 forLes Jolies Choses, the 2010 Prix Renaudot for Apocalypse Baby and Vernon Subutex One won the Prix Anaïs Nin in 2015, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International in 2018.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker)
Originally published in 1994, the translation of this masterpiece by the acclaimed Japanese author into English this year is cause for celebration. Set on an unnamed island in which all kinds of objects and beings disappear – hats, flowers, birds – inhabitants live in terror of the “Memory Police”, whose job is to keep things forgotten. A young novelist and her editor, whom she is hiding under her floorboards, are the protagonists.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
'A masterpiece' Guardian
A compelling speculative mystery by one of Japan's greatest writers.
Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
The Memory Police is a beautiful, haunting and provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, from one of Japan's greatest writers.
'One of Japan's most acclaimed authors explores truth, state surveillance and individual autonomy. Echoes 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and 100 Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own' Time Magazine
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Daunt Books)
This is a punchy first novel set in desolate Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. Originally written in French, the story centres on the relationship between a young French-Korean woman who works as a receptionist in an old guesthouse and a visiting French cartoonist. It was published in France in 2016 to wide acclaim, and is out here in February.
The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (Scribe)
A phenomenon in Georgia, Germany, Poland and Holland, this Georgian saga is published in the UK this week. Spanning six generations of a family between 1900 and the 21st century, its characters travel to Tbilisi, Moscow, London and Berlin in an epic story of doomed romance that combines humour with magic realism.
Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith (Jonathan Cape)
Published in the UK in January, Bae Suah’s hypnotic novel follows one summer night and day in the life of Kim Ayami. After losing her job in Seoul, she walks the hot city all night in search of her disappeared friend in an uncannily affecting and dreamlike story of parallel lives and worlds. Translator Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International prize for Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.
A hypnotic, disorienting story of parallel lives unfolding over a day and a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul's summer
For two years, twenty-eight-year-old Kim Ayami has worked at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind. But now the theatre is shutting down and Ayami’s future is uncertain.
Her last shift completed and the theatre closed for good, Ayami walks the streets of the city with her former boss late into the night. Together they search for a mutual friend who has disappeared. The following day, at the request of that same friend, Ayami acts as a guide for a detective novelist visiting from abroad.
But in the inescapable, all-consuming heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disruptive ways.
Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day is a high-wire feat of storytelling that explores the possibility of worlds beyond the one we see and feel – and shows why Bae Suah is considered one of the boldest voices in Korean literature today.
‘Maike Wetzel writes with an assurance that belies her story’s unsettling menace. Elly is a tautly strung exploration of what it means when all a family desires is the continuation of their own nightmare … because the alternative is absolute despair.’
MELANIE JOOSTEN, AUTHOR OF BERLIN SYNDROME
‘Elly is mesmerising, moving, and deeply unsettling. I read it in a single, fevered session and it has haunted me since.’
EMILY MAGUIRE, AUTHOR OF AN ISOLATED INCIDENT
Elly by Maike Wetzel, translated by Lyn Marven (Scribe)
Revolving around the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl, this slender German novel builds into a brutal, uncomfortable story, told from the alternating perspectives of family members. Just as the family has started to put itself back together the girl reappears, but is so different they begin to doubt whether she’s even the same child. It won prizes in Germany and the translation is out in the UK in April.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo)
Set in a Mexican village, Melchor’s novel, published in the UK in February, focuses on the murder of a woman known as the Witch, whose body is found by a group of boys. This is a dazzling novel and the English-language debut of one of Mexico’s most exciting new voice.
Crossing by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston (Pushkin)
Pajtim Statovci was born in Kosovo and raised in Finland, and his debut My Cat Yugoslavia was an imaginative novel about the refugee experience. His second book, Crossing, was published in the UK in May. It is a complex story about identity, displacement and heartbreak set in the ruins of communist Albania, following two friends who escape the country to attempt a new life in Italy and, later, New York. Statovci inertwines Albanian myth with the grim reality of post-communism, and delivers a strikingly modern narrative where oppression is not just political but lived in the body.
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin review – timely visions of a virtual reality
Strangers connect in this artful exploration of solitude and empathy in a globalised world Justine Jordan Saturday 25 April 2020
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very technological innovation both changes its human users and uncovers something new about our nature. In this ingenious novel, Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin conducts an unnerving thought experiment: if an individual could be virtually inserted into the life of a random stranger, anywhere in the world, what effects would that have on them both? And what hidden truths would be revealed?
Why does Camus’s famous work have two different titles? Alice Kaplan explores a transatlantic mystery
Alice Kaplan
Fri 14 Oct 2016
The Outsider or The Stranger: the right title for the English language translation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, L’Étranger, isn’t obvious. Choosing a title is among the most important decisions a literary translator must make. It is hard to sum up a writer’s work in a new language, and once a title is on the cover, readers start to know the book by that name. An étrangercan mean a foreign national, an alienated outsider or an unfamiliar traveller. So why has the novel always been called The Stranger in American editions, and The Outsider in British ones? The two titles tempt us to fill in the blank with cultural or political theories. We could imagine, for example, that in the melting pot of New York, the immigrant publishing firm Knopf had a sense of foreignness that directed them towards The Stranger, whereas the English publisher Hamish Hamilton, in class conscious Britain, was more aware of social exclusion – hence The Outsider. Both theories, however, are wrong.
By 1946, the war in Europe had been over for a year, enough time for English language publishers to begin thinking about what literature published in Nazi-occupied Europe was worth translating. Blanche Knopf, who founded Knopf with her husband Alfred in 1915, considered translations of contemporary European literature central to her list. She had been cut off from France during the war, but by February 1945 she was back in touch with Jenny Bradley, her agent in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre had lauded a new Camus novel called The Plague in a lecture he gave at Harvard in 1945, and word of its young author reached her. Blanche Knopf cabled Paris, asking to see the book, which was still in manuscript. La Peste, with its link to the suffering and heroism of France during the German occupation, was bound to make a splash, and she understood that Knopf might also have to buy L’Étranger in order to get La Peste, which she considered a more exciting and relevant book. Alfred Knopf cabled Bradley in February, but Camus hadn’t yet finished The Plague. Knopf hesitated. In March 1945, he made an offer of $350 for translation rights on The Stranger, with an option to buy rights for The Plague when it was finished.
Albert Camjus
The British were more enthusiastic than the Americans. Cyril Connolly, the magazine editor and influential literary critic, as feisty and eccentric in his own way as the irrepressible Knopf, had stated in his 1930s book, The Unquiet Grave, that the European novel was a wasteland, consumed by its own formalism. He saw a whole new start for fiction in Camus’s stark, violent, Algerian tale, which seemed to speak directly to a Britain about to begin the process of decolonisation. Connolly brought The Strangerimmediately to the attention of publisher Jamie Hamilton, who purchased British rights from Gallimard in February 1945, with an advance of £75. Hamilton asked Connolly to write an introduction. Hamilton also chose the translator, Stuart Gilbert, a friend of James Joyce who had a good track record translating novels like Man’s Fate by André Malraux. Knopf and Hamilton agreed to share translation costs.
Albert Camus
Gilbert worked fast. By September 1945, he’d sent his complete manuscript to Knopf and Hamilton with instructions and a title, The Stranger. On 10 January 1946, Hamilton sent bound, typeset pages of the translation to Blanche Knopf in New York.
But there was a bombshell in his letter, the announcement of a fait accompli: “I send you herewith a set of corrected galleys of Camus’s L’Étranger, which we have decided to call The Outsider, both because we consider this a more striking and appropriate title than The Stranger, and because Hutchinson’s recently called one of their Russian novels The Stranger.”
In 1945, Hutchinson’s, a rival British publisher, released the translation of what was actually a Polish novel, Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Cudzoziemka, which they had unfortunately entitled The Stranger. At the New York end it was too late to change the title of Camus’s book – Knopf had already typeset it for themselves so that it could be available for the author’s visit to New York in April. The Stranger was printed on the title page, the headers and the spine. They couldn’t redo it.
Blanche Knopf responded tersely to Hamilton’s announcement: “I had assumed when I received the manuscript, because it had instructions on it from Stuart Gilbert, it was setting copy, we read it very carefully and made any necessary corrections. Certainly if I had known there was a chance of corrected galleys, I would not have set, and wish you might have cabled me the new title, which I can well understand your using.”
Hamilton hadn’t cabled; nor had he telephoned. The two publishers may have shared the English language but they were separated by a vast ocean and very different expectations. In London, it hadn’t occurred to Hamilton that Knopf would go to the trouble of producing the book separately. Was Hamilton being patronising? Was Knopf being presumptuous? The combination of an assumption for control on the British side, and an assumption of independence on the American side, make for a fine allegory of British-American relations going back to the revolution that separated us.
Readers were never informed that the two titles were an accident, and for years, no one has been able to explain why Camus’s L’Étranger is sometimes The Stranger, sometimes The Outsider. And while political questions were not part of the original decision, the titles do resonate differently and lend themselves to conflicting political interpretations. An Algerian critic argued recently, in a review of Sandra Smith’s 2013 translation of L’Étranger, that the title The Outsider is politically scandalous, for it effaces the ambiguity in the French word “étranger” and substitutes a more banal idea of someone being “excluded”. He thought Smith’s 2013 title was new – not realising that the British have used it since 1946.
In the end, I prefer The Stranger to The Outsider. Yet Meursault, the narrator of the novel, is not a foreigner; he is a Frenchman in colonial Algiers, a “petit colon”, and his strangeness is more like the strangeness of an outsider than the strangeness of an alien. So I question my own preference. I wonder if I like The Stranger simply because it’s the title I’m used to. How many readers flinched when Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past became, in a new Viking translation, In Search of Lost Time, even though this is a more direct translation? Then there’s Dostoevsky – The Possessed, The Devils, The Demons – what difference does it make?
Whether the titles of translated works sound familiar or foreign, whether they are literal renderings or poetic departures, their fate is unpredictable. L’Étranger has sold millions of copies in Britain and the US. Kuncewiczowa’s The Stranger, the hidden cause of L’Étranger’s two titles, is still considered a masterpiece in Poland. But the English translation is no longer in print.
• Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Outsider: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic is published by University of Chicago.
Adèle by Leïla Slimani review – sex-addiction thriller
The follow-up to Lullaby centres on a modern-day Emma Bovary whose frustrated desires threaten to destroy her family
Leïla Slimani on her shocking bestseller, Lullaby: 'Who can really say they know their nanny?'
Lara Feigel
Thu 14 Feb 2019
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re there secret desires that both endanger family life and make it survivable? Do we long to escape our children? To have sex with strangers at will? The Franco-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 and swiftly became a bestseller here last year. That tale of a murderous nanny, exposing the fetid emotional growths fouling the bourgeois home, was Slimani’s second novelistic investigation of forbidden desires. Now Adèle, the novel she wrote before that breakthrough success, has been translated into English by Sam Taylor.
When we first meet Adèle, she’s leaving the house before her husband and son wake up, looking for sex on the way to work. “Adèle has been good,” the opening proclaims, but now “she wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole.” For several years, she’s combined a sexless marriage to Richard with a closet life as a sex addict, seducing almost all the men she meets. The situation becomes unsustainable when her husband is injured in a road accident, depriving Adèle of freedom because she has to look after him.
Slimani’s novels are hard to categorise. They combine the pace of the thriller with the flatness of tone that we might associate with Michel Houellebecq, or indeed with Camus and Robbe-Grillet. Like those writers, Slimani is drawn to revealing the hellishness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of hell. But this isn’t social satire or commentary. Class and race matter – in Lullaby the employer was of north African descent and the nanny white; here Richard is upper class, Adèle working class – but these aren’t novels hustling for social change or even pushing us to be more honest about the falsity of bourgeois life. They are too story-driven for that. Adèle is rarely likable, but the narrative is on her side, breathless in its fears that sex won’t be available (“She hates the idea that her beauty will be wasted, that her good mood will be for nothing”) or that exposure will follow.
In many ways, Adèle is a modern-day Madame Bovary, but the book itself has less in common with Flaubert than with the sensation novels that Emma Bovary reads addictively. Slimani is trying to shock, arouse and titillate us with extreme mental states. Addiction makes a good subject for her because Adèle’s desire to live a fantasised version of her own life seems to mirror Slimani’s desire to write sleek, fantastical prose, not quite committing to building a three-dimensional world. Like Flaubert, though, she empathises with her character, even at her silliest (Adèle falls asleep with her face in an ashtray), and occasionally we feel something like Flaubert’s interest in the nuances of Adèle’s mind. She likes to read Kundera, and there’s a quote from him in the epigraph: his definition of vertigo not as the fear of falling but as “the desire to fall … the intoxication of the weak”. Slimani seems interested in delineating this intoxication.
In Lullaby, the question driving the book is not only whether the mother Myriam will find a way to survive bourgeois life without feeding off the weakness of another woman, but whether the nanny will give in to her own weakness, abdicating responsibility for keeping her charges alive. Here there’s the question of whether Adèle will allow her addiction to take over her life, destroying her love for her son. Both books are very good at showing that there can be a kind of gleeful pleasure in overcoming your fears by living them out, losing the things you are most desperate to hold on to. “Wanting to is the same as giving in,” Adèle thinks, “the dam has been breached. What good would it do to hold back now?” In both cases, the rapid descents feel just about credible enough to tell us something about the form of vertigo Kundera defined.
Adèle was published in France in 2014; five years later, it appears in Britain in the midst of #MeToo. Some of what it says about sex and power may seem more outdated and therefore taboo-laden now than it did then. Slimani began writing the novel when the Dominique Strauss-Kahn trial was in the news, and there’s some attempt to reverse the usual power structures by making the sex addict a woman. But though Adèle seeks power through sex, she’s attracted to powerful men and she relies on them to overpower her. If Adèle were asked about #MeToo, she would throw back her head with her usual loud laugh and say that the men are only acting as the women want them to. Her constant fantasy is of “the real men, the good ones, somewhere else, the ones who would finally know how to control her body”, and she does not have the intellectual curiosity or the emotional courage to seek new structures for desire. I found myself wondering what kind of novel it could be if her husband were better in bed, or if Adèle were less submissive and had moved further beyond Emma Bovary in her desires. What if it was reasonable rather than self-destructive or self-pitying for a woman to feel constricted by family life and ask for more?
• Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury). Adèle by Leïla Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor, is published by Faber (£12.99).
Leïla Slimani: ‘Everyone asks me, “Why do you choose such subversive or shocking themes?”’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
A LIFE IN WRITING
Interview
Leïla Slimani on her shocking bestseller, Lullaby: 'Who can really say they know their nanny?'
Her murderous nanny thriller gripped France, winning its top literary prize and the attention of President Macron. With Lullaby now out in English, the author shares her thoughts on motherhood, #MeToo and being a Muslim in France Fri 26 Jan 2018
“T
he baby is dead. It only took a few seconds,” so begins Lullaby. First we had the murderous perfect wife, Gone Girl, in 2012, then the murderous perfect husband, The Girl on the Train, in 2015, and now the murderous “perfect nanny” – the US title for the Goncourt-winning French bestseller, published in the States and the UK this month. Lullaby is ménage à trois as domestic noir; the relationship, as intimate and intense as any affair, between a couple and their nanny. It was “like love at first sight”, says Myriam, the mother, of their first meeting. Until, like a “wounded lover”, the nanny stabs the two children in the bath, before slitting her own throat. This is not a spoiler: it’s all there in the devastating opening pages.
“I tried to use all my deepest fears and all my nightmares: losing my children, living with someone I think I know, but actually I don’t know her at all,” says Leïla Slimani, who has a six-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter (and, yes, a nanny). “So at the same time as it was frightening it was also a relief because I could give all my anxiety to my reader, to you!” she laughs disarmingly.
A novel that skewers gender, class and racial stereotypes, but so gently we barely notice, Lullaby looks set to become a publishing sensation, having already sold 600,000 copies in France and with film versions in France and the US under way.
Petite and engagingly expressive, the 36-year-old Moroccan-born author has become something of a poster girl for a re-energised France: “Leïla Slimani Superstar” shouted French Elle beneath a striking photo on their cover (surely a first for a Goncourt winner), while giant pictures of her appeared on bus stops across Paris. President Emmanuel Macron lived up to his bookish reputation by signing her up as an ambassador for Francophone affairs (she reportedly turned down his offer of the role of culture minister). “Everyone was exhausted with these old men giving us lessons,” she says of the new political regime. “It is very refreshing to see this new generation: a lot of women, a lot of young people.”
Infanticide, female sex addiction (the subject of her 2014 first novel, Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre, inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal) and a non-fiction book of first-person testimonies about the “sexual miseries” of Moroccan women – Slimani’s oeuvre is slim, but fearless. “Everyone asks me ‘Why do you choose such subversive or shocking themes?’, but when I’m alone in my office, I’m not like, ‘OK I’m going to shock’. I want to write about a character who fascinates me, someone who I don’t understand.”
Lullaby might begin with the murders, but she set out, rather more mundanely, to write about the ambiguous figure of the nanny. “Who can really say, ‘I know my nanny’?” Slimani asks, sending a chill through every working parent’s heart. “Everyone tells her, ‘You belong to the family’ but everyone knows that she doesn’t.” She grew up in Rabat and her family had a live-in nanny, whom she called her Mouima, little mother, “but I knew she was an employee. If she did anything wrong, my mother or father would tell her, ‘You have to go’.”
Slimani with President Macron. Photograph: POOL/Reuters
But the nanny’s lot, it turned out, made boring fiction: “You go to the park, you make food, you change nappies, so after 100 pages I was like, OK and now?” The “and now” turned out to be the discovery of the real-life murder of two children by their nanny in New York in 2012. “Woah! I thought, I have to start with this,” she says, revealing more than a splinter of ice. “Now the reader is going to be very interested in this very normal family.”
Slimani’s Greek tragedy – we know it ends badly – creates a powerful double perspective: the reader’s terrible foreknowledge undercutting the parents’ fatal ignorance as they entrust their whole world to this “miracle” nanny. It’s hard not to read the novel as a symbolic punishment of the mother and father’s reluctance to relinquish their old lifestyles. Was that deliberate?
“No, not at all,” she insists. But she did want the reader to ask the question. Her character is known only by her first name, Louise, after the British nanny Louise Woodward who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the US in 1997. She remembers the implication made by the defence lawyer in that case, that if the mother, a doctor, had “wanted her children to be safe, she should have stayed at home”. By making us complicit in casting judgment on the parents, Lullabyprobes our enduring fears and prejudices about working mothers.
“We are the first generation of women to whom everyone said: you can have it all – you can have a career, you can have children, you can marry or not marry, you can divorce. Wow, it’s so amazing! But no one gives us the mode d’emploi, the way to do everything. It is too hard,” she says.
Here are the messy contradictions of motherhood: the intensity and the boredom; the hunger for your children and the sense that “they are eating me alive”. Slimani wanted to capture “the anxieties and claustrophobia of being a mother”, and the book’s suffocating pull leaves the reader longing to come up for air.
“When you are a little girl everyone tells you that when you are a mother you are going to be so fulfilled with love, you will never feel lonely any more, you will want to give everything to your children,” Slimani says. The reality, of course, is that there is also “a lot of anxiety, moments of depression, moments when you just want to have a break and go out of your house and be someone else, become who you were before. But it’s a kind of taboo.”
While the novel shines a “light here and there” on the nanny’s sad backstory, it was important that she remain a mystery at the end. Significantly, Louise is white, while Myriam, like the author, is from Morocco – although this is carefully understated, just part of the casual racism and snobbery at play in unexpected ways. “I felt it very important to say that sometimes the boss is an immigrant, and that sometimes the poor are white,” she says. “This made it violent as a social relationship.”
As the only white woman, Louise is the stranger among the already estranged community of immigrant nannies. “When she goes to the park, she’s always alone because she doesn’t speak the same language, she doesn’t come from Africa, or from Ukraine, and I think that is why she commits this act, because she belongs to nowhere and no one. She is at the bottom of society, she is a woman and she is poor. She is no one.”
The bleak depictions of the park will give anyone who’s shivered by the swings a pang of recognition. And it was here that Slimani first had the idea for the novel: “As a writer you don’t only work in an office, so in the afternoon I wander in my neighbourhood and I go to these playgrounds. In the winter it is very sad because you can see all those African women in the traditional dresses but with a big coat on and they are very cold and the children are very cold in those dirty playgrounds.”
Slimani came to Paris to study when she was 18, and fell in love with the city, “but not with the romantic Paris. What fascinates me is the loneliness, the poverty, it’s a violent city. There is something very dark here, especially where I live in Pigalle. It is the district of sex, of eroticism, there’s a lot of immigration. I wanted to show this place.”
Although a date is never mentioned (the external world is glimpsed, filmy and distant, from within the bubble of looking after small children), this is Paris 2015 – at dinner parties, people talk about “their jobs, about terrorism and property prices” and Myriam forbids the children to watch television after the terror attacks in the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in the city. “It was a very difficult year,” Slimani concedes. “It was very violent. Being an immigrant at this time, being a Muslim at this time was a very particular experience, sometimes very sad, sometimes you could feel very humiliated by the way people talked about origins or Islam. How can I use all this atmosphere to build Louise and her loneliness and her madness?” she asked herself.
Slimani worked as a reporter for the weekly journal Jeune Afrique, which was useful training for becoming a novelist, she says, because you have “to observe people, pay attention to details”. Following the birth of her son, it seemed it was finally time to make good her mother’s prediction that she would be a writer one day. Her family enrolled her on a creative writing course, and she gave herself two years.
Her first novel, written in the wake of the Arab spring and set in Morocco, was refused “by every editor in Paris”. They were right, she says now, “it was a total failure”, but that setback freed her from the burden of identity politics. She wrote Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre about as far away from “camels and deserts” as it’s possible to get. “The public and the critics were a little bit surprised that as a Moroccan young woman I was writing about sex and about a French woman in Paris,” she says.
Slimani has been criticised (in her former paper) for choosing such provocative subjects, but following the publication of the non-fiction Sexe et Mensonge: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc (2017), she also received “tonnes” of grateful letters from Moroccan women. The book was published just before the emergence of the #MeToo campaign, and she says: “It is very important for women to break the silence and to stop being ashamed, because the silence is always good for those who harass, for those who are violent, for those who dominate.”
Reading Lullaby feels like a nightmare from which you emerge, as Louise wakes from a heavy sleep, “feeling sad, disoriented, your stomach full of tears”, and the experience of writing it was draining. But its success “is a dream that came true. When I was a little girl and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I got older I always used to say I want to be paid to think. So for me to dream, to think, to write – it is wonderful.”
She is working on another novel, but isn’t telling … Is it going to be shocking? “I hope so!”
Writing has been a profoundly liberating experience for Slimani. “For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write I’m not a woman, I’m not a Muslim, I’m not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself and I can reinvent the world”