Leïla Slimani, countess of Monte-Cristo

Note : 5/5

Leïla Slimani turns into a 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 will come out broken and innocent. The death of her father, Mehdi, in the novel, will force her to wash herself the honor of the “little Arab with glasses” who became president of bank.

After the 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 With a new bourgeoisie, Leïla Slimani tells 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 and don't come back, advises her father … lights up a big fire and takes fire,” he adds, offering him a Kundera book, “life is elsewhere”. A native of Rabat and graduate of Sciences Po Paris, Leïla Slimani is also part of not becoming one of those “small shéherazade who could charm tyrants”. She chose to save her skin differently and favor the salvation of her soul.

An intense Roman

In this saga, Slimani is both Mehdi and Mia, she takes fire, but also the heart and the readers. She is able to speak of men “obsessed with a goal to be achieved”, and women animated by “their vital momentum … their laughter and their love”. She speaks in turn instead of the old amine, the grandfather, who “felt unnecessary”, of the aunt Selma, remained single with her dreams and all her fantasy, of her little sister Inès who hesitates between “betray her country and betray itself ”. This passage from one character to another makes all the charm of this intense novel, and signs the prodigious talent of his author.

Immense novel, too, whose historical and geopolitical dimension shimped between the finesse of the portraits. Morocco and its 17 million tourists reveals its hidden face, evoking the secrets of the Makhzen, power, and its taboos, “religion, the king, the Sahara”. Hymn to freedom, this book goes through New York and the statue of the same name, but America of “big cars and skyscrapers, it still looks like the Third World”. And in London, “it's not like in Paris. An Arab can drive a luxury car without taking it for a dealer ”.

The eye, and the tooth hard, but without acrimony

The winner of the 2016 Goncourt Prize, with “Song Sweet”, which was treated as “Beurette” on her arrival in France observes that “now people find that the Arabs are beautiful”. Slimani has the eye, and the tooth hard, but without acrimony or spirit of revenge. Substituting the grace of literature with the shame of disgrace, this is the mission it had set for itself. Not to tell the truth, but reveal it in fiction.

The revenge of the Countess de Monte-Cristo is sovereign. Twenty later (it is also a novel by Dumas) the death of her father, she writes that she knows who is responsible for the paternal fall, “people whose name I know but that I will be sure”. You have to read this trilogy starting at its start, and continue with volume two, “look at us dance”, but we can just as well immerse in the last where it crosses the mirror.

“I will take the fire”, by Leïla Slimani, ed. Gallimard, 430 p. € 22.90.