Note : 5/5
Leïla Slimani transforms into the Countess of Monte Cristo in this novel inspired by her family history, crossed by the imprisonment of her father, following a slander from which he emerges broken and innocent. The death of her father, Mehdi, in the novel, will force her to clear the honor of the “little Arab with glasses” who became bank president.
After colonized Morocco and the meeting of a beautiful spahi returned to the country with an Alsatian who would become his grandmother, then “the false carelessness which followed independence” with the feudal reign of Hassan II and the emergence of a new bourgeoisie, Leïla Slimani recounts in this third volume, the disappointed hopes born after the enthronement of the new monarch and the “Moroccan movida”, including Mia, her young heroine, will escape.
“Mia, go away and don’t come back, her father advises her… Start a big fire and take the fire away,” he adds, offering her a book by Kundera, “Life is Elsewhere.” A native of Rabat and a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, Leïla Slimani also wanted to avoid becoming one of those “little Scheherazades who would know how to charm tyrants”. She chose to save her skin differently and to prioritize the salvation of her soul.
An intense romance
In this saga, Slimani is both Mehdi and Mia, she takes away the fire, but also the heart and the readers. She shows herself capable of talking about men “obsessed by a goal to achieve”, and women driven by “their vital momentum… their laughter and their love”. She speaks in turn in place of old Amine, the grandfather, who “felt useless”, of aunt Selma, who remained single with her dreams and all her fantasy, of her little sister Inès who hesitates between “betraying her country and betray herself.” This passage from one character to another gives all the charm to this intense novel, and marks the prodigious talent of its author.
Huge novel, too, whose historical and geopolitical dimension shimmers between the finesse of the portraits. Morocco and its 17 million tourists reveal its hidden side, evoking the secrets of the makhzen, power, and its taboos, “religion, the king, the Sahara”. A hymn to freedom, this book passes through New York and the statue of the same name, but the America of “big cars and skyscrapers still looks like the Third World”. And in London, “it’s not like Paris. An Arab can drive a luxury car without being mistaken for a drug dealer.”
-The eye, and the tooth hard, but without acrimony
The winner of the 2016 Goncourt Prize, with “Chanson Douce”, who was called a “Beurette” when she arrived in France, observes that “now people think that Arabs are beautiful”. Slimani has an eye and a hard tooth, but without acrimony or a spirit of revenge. Substituting the grace of literature for the shame of disgrace, such is the mission she set herself. Not tell the truth, but reveal it in fiction.
The revenge of the Countess of Monte Cristo is sovereign. Twenty after (it is also a Dumas novel) the death of her father, she writes that she knows who is responsible for her father’s downfall, “people whose names I know but whom I will keep quiet.” You have to read this trilogy starting at the beginning, and continuing with volume two, “Watch Us Dance”, but you can just as easily delve into the last one where she crosses the mirror.
“I will take away the fire”, by Leïla Slimani, ed. Gallimard, 430 p. €22.90.
