Inspired by the author's family history. In 2022, a young Frenchman and his mother fly to Marrakech to visit his 87-year old grandmother. They are worried because she's complaining about an incessant noise in her apartment that makes her life impossible. This sound, which the narrator and his mother can't/don't hear becomes a metaphor for all the Jews who once lived in Marrakech and have left in the decades since the Six Days War in 1967. The young narrator begins to realize that his grandmother is one of the remaining Jews in Marrakech, and as the trio visits the former Jewish quarter, the Jewish cemetery and two sanctuaries dedicated to famous Jewish rabbis, he seems to hear the echos of what was once a thriving community and now survives only in memories and in the isolated Jewish rituals and celebrations that his grandmother observes.
So this is a story about a young person reconnecting with his family's past, both as individuals, such as when he sees the workshop where his grandfather used to work as a tailor, and as a community - the long-departed Jews who once lived in Marrakech.
There is certainly a lot of nostalgia/melancholy in the book, and I felt that the constant attempts to forge metaphors out of the figure of the grandmother and the noise became a little contrived, a little forced. A little goes a long way in that type of thing, especially when the more straightforward narrative, that of an old woman surviving in her own way of life, which involves a mixture of Jewish and Arabic culture/language, was more than interesting enough. This is a world I had known about only via a beautifully illustrated cookbook I bought a decade ago, and for me it was like an inside peep into that world. That's why this book, for me, was as much an exercise in armchair travel as it was a novel.
Bottom line: promising debut. I can see why it's listed for the Goncourt. Let's hope the author will tone down the strained metaphors in future efforts.