Art of Losing
アルジェリア戦争とその余波を世代横断で描く長編。植民地支配、帰還・同化、言語とアイデンティティの継承を通し、個人と集団の記憶がどのように残り、消えていくかを繊細に描き出す作品。
作品情報
アルジェリア戦争とその余波を世代横断で描く長編。植民地支配、帰還・同化、言語とアイデンティティの継承を通し、個人と集団の記憶がどのように残り、消えていくかを繊細に描き出す作品。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Picador Paper
- 発売日
- 2022-03-22
- ページ数
- 448ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 14.13 x 2.84 x 21.91 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781250829269
- ISBN-10
- 1250829267
- 価格
- 3335 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Historical
Across three generations, three wars, two continents, and the mythic waters of the Mediterranean, one family’s history leads to an inevitable question: What price do our descendants pay for the choices that we make? Naïma knows Algeria only by the artifacts she encounters in her grandparents’ tiny apartment in Normandy: the language her grandmother speaks but Naïma can’t understand, the food her grandmother cooks, and the precious things her grandmother carried when they fled. Naïma’s father claims to remember nothing; he has made himself French. Her grandfather died before he could tell her his side of the story. But now Naïma will travel to Algeria to see for herself what was left behind—including their secrets. The Algerian War for Independence sent Naïma’s grandfather on a journey of his own, from wealthy olive grove owner and respected veteran of the First World War, to refugee spurned as a harki by his fellow Algerians in the transit camps of southern France, to immigrant barely scratching out a living in the north. The long battle against colonial rule broke apart communities, opened deep rifts within families, and saw the whims of those in even temporary power instantly overturn the lives of ordinary people. Where does Naïma’s family fit into this history? How do they fit into France’s future? Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing is a powerful, moving family novel that spans three generations across seventy years and two shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a resonant people’s history of Algeria and its diaspora. It is a story of how we carry on in the face of loss: loss of country, identity, language, connection. Most of all, it is an immersive, riveting excavation of the inescapable legacies of colonialism, immigration, family, and war.
Alice Zeniter is a French novelist, translator, screenwriter, and director. Her novel Take This Man was published in English by Europa Editions in 2011. Zeniter has won many awards in France for her work, including the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens, and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, which was awarded to The Art of Losing . She lives in Brittany. Frank Wynne has translated the work of numerous French and Hispanic authors, including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Virginie Despentes. His work has earned him many prizes, including the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with Houellebecq for The Elementary Particles . His translation of Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia won the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
レビュー
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Nothing to dislike. Totally worth a read.
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I recently read a superb account of the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954 - 1962. A harrowing time in the history of Algeria, to say the least. And then, fortuitously, I came across this superb novel, chronicling how these events affected three generations of an Algerian family. A tour de force that was hard to put down. If you have an interest in the subject matter these two books together will not disappoint.
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The third person omniscient viewpoint of this marvelous novel, so well translated it seems to have been written in English, give the reader a the rich experience of seeming to live through decades of family history. As an American, I was shown the complex web of each generation’s struggle with the identity imposed by exile, through the lives lived by the characters along with absorbing national story-telling. I also learned so much about the end of France’s colonial rule over Algeria and the toll extracted on Algerians. I can better imagine what this book means to French - and Algerian - and all the mixtures thereof - people, those intimately involved.
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See above for my review of this enticing novel. I do recommend this historical, multi-generational story to anyone with a sense of adventure and an interest in National history.
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A cause of some concern to people who have migrated or are descended from people who migrated as refugees, or without wanting to do so is the question of belonging to a culture, a country they have left behind and they cannot return to. Intertwined with that is the question of whether they truly and fully belong to a new country, another culture where they may not always be welcome. Brilliantly handled through the story of an Algerian family settled in France after the Algerian independence. The old country did not want them either. And the old country had changed, the mythical construct of the old country of memory no longer exists if it ever did! I too am such an unwilling migrant, though not as a refugee. I found resonances in this book. I wonder what the feelings of my descendants will be?
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