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The Art of Losing<\/em> sweeps through colonised rural Algeria, French immigrant camps, and contemporary Paris, its protagonists dislocated from every \u201chome\u201d they try to inhabit. The narrative opens in the present day: Na\u00efma works in a Parisian art gallery, and carries an unspoken family legacy that gnaws away at her, and which she longs to understand. To do this, she has to go back to her origins, and this is where the flashback that makes up most of the novel begins. Na\u00efma\u2019s grandfather, Ali, owns an olive grove in Algeria. He fought for France in the Second World War, frequents a veteran\u2019s club, and has a successful life until the arrival of FLN (National Liberation Front) in the village turns their lives upside down. Uncertain about the promises of the FLN, Ali prefers to observe from the sidelines, but his inaction rapidly marks him out as an enemy, until he is left with no choice but to protect himself by becoming one.<\/p>\n Under threat in Algeria for real or perceived collaborations with the colonisers, Ali must escape with his family on a boat to France, where he is promised he will be looked after. Once there, \u201cFrance\u201d amounts to a resettlement camp, cold and inhuman, offering no possibility of integration into the country that is supposed to be their home, because \u201cfor these people to forget an entire country, they would have had to be offered a new one. But the doors of France were not thrown open to them, only the gates of a camp.\u201d Declared an enemy of the homeland they will never see again, Ali and his family are emotionally anchored to Algeria and administratively adrift in France: even when they leave the resettlement camp and have a home of their own, their world is restricted to the apartment, the factory where Ali works, and the supermarket. France is for them a France of the periphery, a France of utility, a \u201ctrap in which he [Ali] has lost himself\u201d.<\/p>\n In the next generation, the focus is on Ali\u2019s son Hamid, forced to grow up too soon, and to help his parents navigate life in France. Language creates a gulf between the generations, Hamid rejecting his native Arabic as he associates it with the family\u2019s inability to integrate. As Hamid grows further away from his parents, so the gulf between his past and present increases, until his memories become \u201ctwisted shards \u2026 refashioned by years of silence.\u201d Aware that neither the Algeria of his childhood nor the France of settlement camps and \u201crelocations\u201d represent any kind of promised land, Hamid carves out his own path and rejects his heritage, not passing on his language to his children. This leaves his daughter Na\u00efma unable to communicate with her grandmother; reluctantly, she decides to rebuild the stories of her family\u2019s past, fearing that the absence might turn out to be more comfortable than what she might uncover. Na\u00efma embarks on a return to her origins that she hopes will reassemble the shards of memory and legacy passed down to her, and fill the silences that she has inherited: \u201cbetween these slivers \u2013 like caulk, like plaster oozing between the cracks \u2026 there is Na\u00efma\u2019s research, begun sixty years after they have left Algeria.\u201d<\/p>\n As you can probably tell from the extracts I\u2019ve included here, Frank Wynne\u2019s translation is excellent: there is a lot of drama in this novel, and it could easily have turned to melodrama with overly literal translation. Wynne\u2019s attention to understatement is admirable (\u201cAli dreams of all the things his son might be. Suddenly, a white-hot blast filled with shards of glass sends him sprawling\u201d); the dialogues flow smoothly and believably, and the descriptions are lavish but never over-the-top. There are comic backhanders (\u201cThis union brings him two daughters \u2013 a terrible disappointment, the family mutters by the bedside of the mother, who promptly dies of shame\u201d) and many examples of impeccable lexical choices (\u201cIt is like the shriek <\/em>of nails on a blackboard\u201d, \u201cThey use words that wound and seethe<\/em>\u201d, \u201cwar cleaves [the family] like a ploughshare splitting a mound of earth, scattering it in little divots<\/em> of farewell\u201d).<\/p>\n There\u2019s only one thing I didn\u2019t much like in The Art of Losing<\/em>: the title. It comes, of course, from the poem by Elizabeth Bishop; it certainly is appropriate to the subject matter, but the moment when the poem itself makes its appearance felt a little contrived. Overall, though, The Art of Losing <\/em>represents an important contribution to the legacy of the Algerian war, a meditation on a cultural divide that persists today, and an embodiment of the claim within its own pages that fiction and research are equally necessary to shed light on this, because \u201cthey are all that remains to fill the silences handed on with the vignettes from one generation to the next.\u201d<\/p>\n Translated from French by Frank Wynne (Picador Books, 2021) Alice Zeniter\u2019s multi-generational narrative The Art of Losing deals with the troubled legacy of the Algerian War of Independence, focusing on one family\u2019s difficulties in coming to terms with the unnamed experience and unresolved traumas that are handed down through generations. Multiple historians have noted that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[67,361,363,747,909],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReview copy of\u00a0The Art of Losing\u00a0<\/em>provided by Picador Books<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"