This novel is original in many ways. First, this book falls in a distinctive category apart from all known regular categories. It falls in the category of bio-fiction, in which the author wrote a fiction story based partly on her life and using herself as the leading character. Second of all, the author chose a rare style of writing 3 letters to a specific person she identifies at the end of the first letter. These 3 letters were written in 3 different times at 26, 30, and 32 years old of the leading character. Finally, the story told throughout this novel is also original and creative taking unexpected twists and u-turns.
The novel relates the story of a young Tunisian woman going to Paris to study falling in love with a Frenchman of Italian origins from the beguinning til the end of the relationship spanning almost a decade. While the story might seem very familiar to readers from North African countries, it takes sudden unexpected deviation from the regular and traditional stories we've heard or read about in our environnement.
The author was able to reveal herself, the leading character, the women (women in plurial not a mistake) inside her. She bares literally and figuratively naked her soul, her heart, and her body. The reader is able to feel with her everything: her loves, her dilemmas, her sufferings, and her feelings. The author was able to communicate to the readers how the woman was caught throughout her life in Paris between two countries, two loves, and a permanently self-imposed past against an uncertain and varying present and future.
I liked this novel very much because the author dared for her first novel to use an original writting style in an unsual genre and to write about a taboo topic so little written about in literature.