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This Tilting World
Tunisia, 26 June 2015: on the night following the terrorist massacre of thirty-eight tourists on the beach of Sousse, a woman tries to take stock of what's happened, facing the Mediterranean Sea. Personal tragedies soon resurface - the deaths of a dear friend, a fellow writer who just weeks ago died at sea, having forsaken the work that had given his life meaning; and of another lifelong friend: her father, a quiet, seemingly simple man who had left all that he held dear in Tunisia, to emigrate to France. Both an adieu and a love letter to Fellous's motherland, This Tilting World closes a trilogy on the history of Tunisia's Jewish community. From Tunisia to Paris, to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, and with nods to Proust and Barthes, Fellous offers a multitude of colourful portraits, and sweeps readers onto a lyrical journey, giving a voice to those one rarely gets to hear, and to loved ones now silent.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
8 people are currently reading
1484 people want to read
About the author
Colette Fellous
28 books4 followersThe author of more than twenty novels, including Aujourd'hui (2005), for which she received the Prix Marguerite Duras, and La Préparation de la vie (2014), in which she pays homage to her mentor Roland Barthes, Colette Fellous lives between France and Tunisia.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
November 22, 2019
This tilting world, how can we talk about it, how make sense of it?
This Tilting World has been translated by the excellent Sophie Lewis (Blue Self-Portrait, Faces on the Tip of My Tongue), from the French original Pièces détachées by Colette Fellous, and published by Les Fugitives, home of some of the very best Francophone literature in translation.
The novel opens in Tunis on 27 June 2015, the day after the Sousse beach attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_So...) and our narrator reflects on a number of recent atrocities, as well as a personal one, the sudden death of a friend:
It all happened in the same period, over a few short months. In Paris, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the one at the Port de Vincennes kosher supermarket in January. The Bardo in March. Alain two weeks ago, and yesterday the beach at Sousse. Always on a Wednesday or a Friday. Of course Alain’s death should not be on this list, it has nothing to do with the others, his was an accidental death, heart-attack, most likely. The others were murders, premeditated crimes, attacks. But these collective shocks, this blows to our bodies and our personal lives, have become interleaved with Alain’s death, with the shock of the death, in the heat of the day, down in the village streets. He died on his sailing boat, in mid-ocean, in the space of a few minutes.
I could talk about that death, I haven’t the strength to discuss the others. This tilting world, how can we talk about it, how make sense of it?
The narrator's father was the last of several generations to live in the Jewish community in Tunisia, but felt forced some years earlier to leave the country for France, a land he had always held out as a guarantor of stability. She herself returns frequently to Tunis, but decides that this time will be a farewell.
As she looks back on her family history and her own life, her writing is self-consciously Proustian, but also influenced by Flaubert (with memories of a Normandy village that may have served for as a model for the home of the Bovary's, and where her own relatives once lived) and Barthes (a newspaper article he wrote about 'the fight for softness' is a key motif):
I count and recount, trek back through the years and the cities, I play hopscotch on our patio, shunting my Florentine liquorice tin all the way to heaven but I’m also the woman writing this book today in Paris, I allow Proust’s voice to join me, ‘everything revolved around me in the darkness: things, countries, years’, and the voices of Flaubert, Maupassant, Rimbaud, I am never without their words for long.
Although her memories are in many cases more imagining, such as one scene, set at the same time that Proust was writing his magnum opus, where she thinks of herself holding her father as a baby:
So today I’m holding my baby father in my arms—this is what I’ve done all my life: cradle him, cradle them both in their innocence and sweetness, and even cradle what I call the country, never knowing exactly what I mean by the term. Tunisia or the long-past memories of my parents? I don’t know. I held them up so they would not collapse. I chose reading to help me discover the best way of going about this. I chose pleasure. I chose love. Sensations, stories, shades of meaning. Now I think I got it all wrong. I should have been harder, sharper, more violent. I should have fought some other way. But that’s how it was: every time I was transfixed by the modest attentions of the people I met, by the delicacy of a gesture or by the extraordinary way a life was retold, the crucial detail dropped in at precisely the right moment; every time the laughter united and strengthened us, you have to come here to understand and to love the very humblest intimately for they are magnificent. And then there was the balmy wind, the kiss of the air, the pale colors, the blue, white, gray, and all this beauty of the sea right out to the horizon, the movement of the skies that followed one after another, ever renewed, these helped me to camouflage the tensions and the charged, sometimes jealous or malevolent looks—yes, we had those too. Still, I should have gone about it differently.
It all makes for a beautifully written and moving story - reaching for a lazy comparison, like Andrei Makine but with a sharper edge.
Recommended and another from translator Sophie Lewis to watch for the 2020 International Booker. And rather like Annie Ernaux's 2019 contender The Years, a novel without fiction, that straddles the boundary into autobiograpical memoir. The author's own take on this:
https://www.lorientlitteraire.com/art...
Q: Sur la couverture de votre livre, Pièces détachées, rien n’est écrit sous le titre, ni roman, ni essai, ni récit. Si votre éditeur l’exigeait, qu’écririez-vous ?
Pour Plein été, j’avais mis roman. En vérité, pour celui-là je préfère ne rien mettre. C’est une histoire qui mêle l’autobiographie et la construction romanesque. Je me promène dans le temps, je construis une forme. Ce n’est pas un roman car tout est vrai. J’ai pris toutes les libertés du roman avec l’exactitude du récit. Je suis fascinée par ce qui fait de nous des êtres humains, par la relation qui nous échappe entre le passé et le présent. Tous ces échos, toutes ces résonances qu’il faut capter pour comprendre. Il n’y a pas de maîtrise dans cette histoire, je jette ces éléments, ensuite, je construis le récit de façon rigoureuse
This Tilting World has been translated by the excellent Sophie Lewis (Blue Self-Portrait, Faces on the Tip of My Tongue), from the French original Pièces détachées by Colette Fellous, and published by Les Fugitives, home of some of the very best Francophone literature in translation.
The novel opens in Tunis on 27 June 2015, the day after the Sousse beach attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_So...) and our narrator reflects on a number of recent atrocities, as well as a personal one, the sudden death of a friend:
It all happened in the same period, over a few short months. In Paris, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the one at the Port de Vincennes kosher supermarket in January. The Bardo in March. Alain two weeks ago, and yesterday the beach at Sousse. Always on a Wednesday or a Friday. Of course Alain’s death should not be on this list, it has nothing to do with the others, his was an accidental death, heart-attack, most likely. The others were murders, premeditated crimes, attacks. But these collective shocks, this blows to our bodies and our personal lives, have become interleaved with Alain’s death, with the shock of the death, in the heat of the day, down in the village streets. He died on his sailing boat, in mid-ocean, in the space of a few minutes.
I could talk about that death, I haven’t the strength to discuss the others. This tilting world, how can we talk about it, how make sense of it?
The narrator's father was the last of several generations to live in the Jewish community in Tunisia, but felt forced some years earlier to leave the country for France, a land he had always held out as a guarantor of stability. She herself returns frequently to Tunis, but decides that this time will be a farewell.
As she looks back on her family history and her own life, her writing is self-consciously Proustian, but also influenced by Flaubert (with memories of a Normandy village that may have served for as a model for the home of the Bovary's, and where her own relatives once lived) and Barthes (a newspaper article he wrote about 'the fight for softness' is a key motif):
I count and recount, trek back through the years and the cities, I play hopscotch on our patio, shunting my Florentine liquorice tin all the way to heaven but I’m also the woman writing this book today in Paris, I allow Proust’s voice to join me, ‘everything revolved around me in the darkness: things, countries, years’, and the voices of Flaubert, Maupassant, Rimbaud, I am never without their words for long.
Although her memories are in many cases more imagining, such as one scene, set at the same time that Proust was writing his magnum opus, where she thinks of herself holding her father as a baby:
So today I’m holding my baby father in my arms—this is what I’ve done all my life: cradle him, cradle them both in their innocence and sweetness, and even cradle what I call the country, never knowing exactly what I mean by the term. Tunisia or the long-past memories of my parents? I don’t know. I held them up so they would not collapse. I chose reading to help me discover the best way of going about this. I chose pleasure. I chose love. Sensations, stories, shades of meaning. Now I think I got it all wrong. I should have been harder, sharper, more violent. I should have fought some other way. But that’s how it was: every time I was transfixed by the modest attentions of the people I met, by the delicacy of a gesture or by the extraordinary way a life was retold, the crucial detail dropped in at precisely the right moment; every time the laughter united and strengthened us, you have to come here to understand and to love the very humblest intimately for they are magnificent. And then there was the balmy wind, the kiss of the air, the pale colors, the blue, white, gray, and all this beauty of the sea right out to the horizon, the movement of the skies that followed one after another, ever renewed, these helped me to camouflage the tensions and the charged, sometimes jealous or malevolent looks—yes, we had those too. Still, I should have gone about it differently.
It all makes for a beautifully written and moving story - reaching for a lazy comparison, like Andrei Makine but with a sharper edge.
Recommended and another from translator Sophie Lewis to watch for the 2020 International Booker. And rather like Annie Ernaux's 2019 contender The Years, a novel without fiction, that straddles the boundary into autobiograpical memoir. The author's own take on this:
https://www.lorientlitteraire.com/art...
Q: Sur la couverture de votre livre, Pièces détachées, rien n’est écrit sous le titre, ni roman, ni essai, ni récit. Si votre éditeur l’exigeait, qu’écririez-vous ?
Pour Plein été, j’avais mis roman. En vérité, pour celui-là je préfère ne rien mettre. C’est une histoire qui mêle l’autobiographie et la construction romanesque. Je me promène dans le temps, je construis une forme. Ce n’est pas un roman car tout est vrai. J’ai pris toutes les libertés du roman avec l’exactitude du récit. Je suis fascinée par ce qui fait de nous des êtres humains, par la relation qui nous échappe entre le passé et le présent. Tous ces échos, toutes ces résonances qu’il faut capter pour comprendre. Il n’y a pas de maîtrise dans cette histoire, je jette ces éléments, ensuite, je construis le récit de façon rigoureuse
November 26, 2019
Memoir 8 of my Nonfiction November reading project.
This slim book about leaving Tunisia amidst personal and terrorist violence is also a reflection on memory and family, with frequent connections to music, film, and literature. It forced me to slow down and be with Fellous in her view of the sea, in her head and ears, and in feeling how much you can love a place yet want to leave it.
I also listened to the music mentioned along the way, which is quite the immersive experience.
This slim book about leaving Tunisia amidst personal and terrorist violence is also a reflection on memory and family, with frequent connections to music, film, and literature. It forced me to slow down and be with Fellous in her view of the sea, in her head and ears, and in feeling how much you can love a place yet want to leave it.
I also listened to the music mentioned along the way, which is quite the immersive experience.
August 6, 2024
A beautifully written piece in the sense that she effectively creates a lyrical style which allows each page to melt away in your hands. It's fluid and gentle, often without pauses or full stops, but so well written that it flows smoothly, always drawing you further in. I would say that her prose is generally quite crisp, never anything more innovative than this, and the real quality of her writing is found in the content of her words rather than the words themselves. It was a joy to read, like being on the balcony of her Tunisia home and listening to the waves.
As far as the story is concerned, there isn't one; it's unquestionably a novel which combines fictional narrative with real life, perhaps even best described as autofiction - I dunno, it's hard to describe. It begins with her receiving a phone call and discovering that her friend, Alain, has died. This triggers a series of memories around her own father's death and a general outline of the life she has lived between France and Tunisia, not to mention her Jewish ancestry. The book has a distinct voice which is ethereal in nature, often vague and meandering, prone to the kind of navel-gazing I generally dislike but Fellous knows when to stop romanticising the past and when to return to the ugly present (there are lots of references to the terrorist acts happening in Tunisia, the Charlie Hebdo incident, the general feeling of unease). She ultimately decides to return to France but explores her life between these two worlds.
As much as I enjoyed it, for some reason I felt less engaged after the halfway point -- I'm not sure why. Her reminiscing becomes less meaningful, less enticing, but the book always remains immensely readable. It is the embodiment of the reflective novel, the gentle reminiscing of a life gone by. But it never becomes mawkish or cloying, never indulgent or deliberately obscure. I give her immense credit for that (others often fail quite badly). I could practically smell the almond and orange cake, the sweet incense, the salt in the ocean. I was very much in the warmth of a north African sun. The book was ultimately a very delicate and gentle experience, one which I breathed in with interest and exhaled with satisfaction. Would recommend.
As far as the story is concerned, there isn't one; it's unquestionably a novel which combines fictional narrative with real life, perhaps even best described as autofiction - I dunno, it's hard to describe. It begins with her receiving a phone call and discovering that her friend, Alain, has died. This triggers a series of memories around her own father's death and a general outline of the life she has lived between France and Tunisia, not to mention her Jewish ancestry. The book has a distinct voice which is ethereal in nature, often vague and meandering, prone to the kind of navel-gazing I generally dislike but Fellous knows when to stop romanticising the past and when to return to the ugly present (there are lots of references to the terrorist acts happening in Tunisia, the Charlie Hebdo incident, the general feeling of unease). She ultimately decides to return to France but explores her life between these two worlds.
As much as I enjoyed it, for some reason I felt less engaged after the halfway point -- I'm not sure why. Her reminiscing becomes less meaningful, less enticing, but the book always remains immensely readable. It is the embodiment of the reflective novel, the gentle reminiscing of a life gone by. But it never becomes mawkish or cloying, never indulgent or deliberately obscure. I give her immense credit for that (others often fail quite badly). I could practically smell the almond and orange cake, the sweet incense, the salt in the ocean. I was very much in the warmth of a north African sun. The book was ultimately a very delicate and gentle experience, one which I breathed in with interest and exhaled with satisfaction. Would recommend.
August 30, 2019
Very slowly I drink my glass of muscat. So many images in just a few seconds. With each sip the throbbing of even more invisible hearts joins me, moments of a life, reflections of light on a face, the scars of hours, culled from the past or perhaps still unknown, thousands of sparks dissolved in my every breath.
This year Two Lines Press has published two excellent books by women, both set partly in Tunisia and partly in Europe, that examine memory, family, and violence in the lives of people who have fled their homeland but continue to live there in their minds, and in the case of This Tilting World in an occasional physical basis. Both are powerful: Igiaba
Scego’s Beyond Babylon in a more visceral way, Tilting in a sadder, elegiac way. I recommend both highly. Kudos to both translators.
They are outstanding in quite different ways. Babylon communicates the anguish of a woman who says “This is what happened in Somalia under the Italians!” “This is what happened in Argentina to the disappeared and their families!” Tilting asks “What is happening in the country I love?” But the books are not diatribes. These authors are artists, who build complex environments for their explorations of where violence comes from and what effect it has on victims. Both approach the topic through family relationships, the personal.
Both works are confusing at first, you know the narrators are displaced but how? Little by little the picture becomes clearer. In Babylon there are five primary narrators, with chapters rotating among them. So you get each character’s view of events from their perspective. Tilting is very much the first-person story of a woman trying to make sense of a world that is falling apart around her—not counting the flashbacks it takes place during the two weeks after the beach resort massacre in Tunisia in 2015.She has come back to Tunisia, as she does periodically, although she lives most of the time in France. She grew up in Tunisia, her family part of its Jewish population for centuries, but after the six days war they departed for France. As she mourns both the country that can produce a terrorist like this one, and the sudden death of a dear friend from natural causes, she tries to reconstruct the adult lives of her parents, lives she only perceived as a child. There is an undercurrent of having been out of place even though there had been a community of Jews in Tunis for hundreds of years. Now, she thinks, she has to leave for good.
Writers and musicians are her companions as she remembers. Proust and Maupassant, Feyrouz and Umm Kulthum. Smells, qualities of light. The story also encompasses the friends and strangers she has met in France, some eccentric, a few brutal, some now part her own family. But it is hard to place the people who drift through her thoughts, where is she, where are they in these scenes? Such is the life of an emigrant, waking and dreaming one is constantly asking, ‘where am I right now?’
Colette Fellous, the author, is only a few months older than I am, so perhaps I am more able than many readers to enter into her memories of how it felt to be alive in the world at each age she describes, even if our worlds and family cultures were thousands of miles apart. She captures the sometimes distorted, sometimes semi-hallucinogenic, usually snapshot memories of childhood and the physical environment of childhood experiences: cafés, apartments, beaches, streets.
Fellous describes being bewildered and distraught at the terrorism, but much of her anguish comes from the memories of personal events she now realizes were more bittersweet or even painful than she realized at the time. This is very much an elegy for her father, a gentle man who made the best of what he had and instilled admirable human values in his children. She writes in memoriam for her beloved father. As a tribute and as an experience of looking backward from maturity as she is forced to leave the place she has been grounded, as it is destroyed as a refuge, this work is beautiful and poignant.
Thank you, I whispered it in Arabic, very politely, and I added still in Arabic: Life be with you. All day long here we repeat life be with you, it’s another way of saying thank you, we say it when we take our change, when we ask how are you, when answering someone’s smile, when it’s morning or when it’s evening, when we’re happy for someone else’s fortune and we show it (then it’s they who say it to us), life be with you; magical, protective words, a talisman, as if upon speaking it we sense that a mere breath could blow us away, there and then, and that talisman, the words that say life be with you, will ward off death, we say it automatically, without really thinking, then one day a life is blown away for good.
Life be with you.
May 18, 2020
Elegant, elegiac and exceptionally lovely.
Fellous uses the untimely, unexpected deaths of both her father and a friend to examine Tunis, terrorism, colonialism, marginalization and liminality, and ideals of home and family, all in the most exquisite prose. While grief and loss make up the theme of this book, the writing is never heavy as Fellous layers her recollections in chapters that shift in time and place, joy and sorrow. She manages to take the deeply personal and merge it with collective grief, never exploiting or slighting either one. Moving without being maudlin, this feels like essential reading right now.
Fellous uses the untimely, unexpected deaths of both her father and a friend to examine Tunis, terrorism, colonialism, marginalization and liminality, and ideals of home and family, all in the most exquisite prose. While grief and loss make up the theme of this book, the writing is never heavy as Fellous layers her recollections in chapters that shift in time and place, joy and sorrow. She manages to take the deeply personal and merge it with collective grief, never exploiting or slighting either one. Moving without being maudlin, this feels like essential reading right now.
September 8, 2019
[3.5] The recent death of a friend. The Sousse terrorist attacks the previous day. Shocked by the prevalence of death in her life in 2015, Fellous reminisces her life in Tunisia and France as well as the death of her father in what is largely an autobiographical novel of memories. Full-color photographs accompany the text, further flouting the distinction between fiction and memoir.
Surprisingly, at midpoint, I grew detached from Fellous’ personal memories – somehow they failed to resonate, and, contrary to what I usually look for in novels, I kept wishing for a little more coherent storytelling over the deeply pensive descriptions of of places, people, and events. There are, however, some definite highlights here, such as the way Fellous imagines herself as the mother of her own father, an innovative way to examine family relations.
I am willing to give this another chance if it ends up on prize lists, since it’s easy to see that Fellous is a skillful, experienced writer, and Sophie Lewis’ translation renders Fellous’ lush descriptions of Tunisia and Normandy beautifully.
Surprisingly, at midpoint, I grew detached from Fellous’ personal memories – somehow they failed to resonate, and, contrary to what I usually look for in novels, I kept wishing for a little more coherent storytelling over the deeply pensive descriptions of of places, people, and events. There are, however, some definite highlights here, such as the way Fellous imagines herself as the mother of her own father, an innovative way to examine family relations.
I am willing to give this another chance if it ends up on prize lists, since it’s easy to see that Fellous is a skillful, experienced writer, and Sophie Lewis’ translation renders Fellous’ lush descriptions of Tunisia and Normandy beautifully.
March 2, 2022
A book that made me smile and sigh, often one after the other. Such heartfelt and deep emotions run through this short tale of leaving-and-returning. I am also jealous beyond belief when I think of the memories Fellous has, of the variety and depth of history, culture, language, art, architecture and beauty of Tunisia and France. I just loved reading this book from start to finish. Fellous has a powerful emotional resonance in her writing that almost makes you feel like you are right there with her, with her family, with her memories. She weaves smells, sounds, sights, touches, and tastes into every aspect of the tales she recounts. There is also deep, terrible, and hard truths about violence and death, and she spares no words in describing the wrongs and evils of humanity. This is also a very intelligent and literary book, and I loved the multitude of references to the giants of the book world. A profoundly moving book that will stay with me for a long time. I hope more of Fellous’ works get translated to English, and soon.
September 5, 2019
I’m no expert on translation but this book is so rich in its language, the translation is a masterpiece; the stories told are beautiful themselves, but the language used is just as lush and arresting. It’s kind of rare for me to find that kind of writing where I’m truly mesmerized by the words being used, as it can often be overdone or too metaphor-heavy, but this was not the case here. Fellous writes of Tunisia with such care and tenderness, I felt transported to the local streets, with all its sights, sounds, and smells.
Intertwined with her reckoning of the violence in Tunisia are personal fragments from Fellous’ life. Her kind father and his death, memories of her youth, intriguing characters she met along her life’s path. The pain of looking at the home you love and feeling as though you have no choice to abandon it bleed through the pages. At what point does the political and personal intersect to where it can no longer be ignored? Fellous grapples with this, gracefully and with love and empathy. It’s a question I fear is becoming more pertinent with every passing day here in America now. Perhaps we can learn something from Fellous and the way she delicately navigates intolerance and violence, without letting the home she loves off the hook. Haunting, visceral, and gorgeous, this will be one my best books of 2019. Thank you so much Two Lines Press for sending this my way.
Intertwined with her reckoning of the violence in Tunisia are personal fragments from Fellous’ life. Her kind father and his death, memories of her youth, intriguing characters she met along her life’s path. The pain of looking at the home you love and feeling as though you have no choice to abandon it bleed through the pages. At what point does the political and personal intersect to where it can no longer be ignored? Fellous grapples with this, gracefully and with love and empathy. It’s a question I fear is becoming more pertinent with every passing day here in America now. Perhaps we can learn something from Fellous and the way she delicately navigates intolerance and violence, without letting the home she loves off the hook. Haunting, visceral, and gorgeous, this will be one my best books of 2019. Thank you so much Two Lines Press for sending this my way.
September 12, 2019
IN BOOKSTORES NOW!
A Must-Read New Book of Fall 2019 —The Observer
11 Books You Should Read this September —Lit Hub
34 Books You Should Read this Fall —Nylon
“In THIS TILTING WORLD, French-Tunisian novelist Fellous has written something more intimate than a novel . . . Against an act of terrorism that threatened to transform her polyglot Tunisian world of castoff peoples […] into something unrecognizable, the flight into memory is a refusal to let them be swept away.”
“THIS TILTING WORLD is a fast-moving reflection on leaving Tunisia following the terrorist attack that killed thirty-eight tourists on the beach at Sousse . . . A meditative nonfiction horror story on the North African coast, This Tilting World crashes over the reader in waves.”—Lit Hub
A Must-Read New Book of Fall 2019 —The Observer
11 Books You Should Read this September —Lit Hub
34 Books You Should Read this Fall —Nylon
“In THIS TILTING WORLD, French-Tunisian novelist Fellous has written something more intimate than a novel . . . Against an act of terrorism that threatened to transform her polyglot Tunisian world of castoff peoples […] into something unrecognizable, the flight into memory is a refusal to let them be swept away.”
“THIS TILTING WORLD is a fast-moving reflection on leaving Tunisia following the terrorist attack that killed thirty-eight tourists on the beach at Sousse . . . A meditative nonfiction horror story on the North African coast, This Tilting World crashes over the reader in waves.”—Lit Hub
September 14, 2019
Like real reminiscence, hers emerges pell-mell with no regard for narrative arcs. It’s a ‘telly’ style I’ve encountered before in French translation; many love it, but I prefer to be ‘shown’ in a manner that lets me form my own opinions. There seemed too little distance between narrator and author (though there are also surprising gaps), as if the book were her own indulgence and not a gift to the reader. It felt like I’d chosen the wrong seat on a train, beside a woman determined to dump her thoughts on me with no interest in my own.
Full review
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Full review
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February 2, 2023
“I say, too: could all of us, perhaps, without knowing it, the French, the Italian, the Maltese, the Jews, the Greeks, the Muslims of this country, we who watch and play together at the café, in this small nowhere-town, yes could all of us already be refugees, already hostages or prisoners, or even disappeared?”
“In Tunisia I was in exile, something rang false, I couldn’t put my finger on it, yet it genuinely was my native country (…). I learned young to be torn in two, not to be shocked by the feeling, to breathe through it. To love leaving and then returning, to be always between two or three cities, to keep several languages equally in play and even not to understand everything of a place in order better to grasp the sensations, the nuances.”
The Tilting World by the Tunisian – French writer, Colette Fellous is a beautiful, enriching book, an ode to the author’s home country, Tunisia, infused with lyricism, engulfed in a veil of melancholy and sadness, full of profound reflections on the meaning of home, forced exile, belonging, multiple identities, and loss as well as trauma, violence and history shaping one’s life.
As another atrocity is committed, the narrator of this book decides “to disengage” with her home country by leaving Tunisia behind. Reflecting on her own life, that of her parents and ancestors and drawing inspiration from many French literary masterpieces, the narrator pens down a story of resilience which takes shape of a love letter to her ‘home’ and her sense of belonging. Colette Fellous invites us to learn about Tunisia’s Jewish community and its exodus as a result of numerous political turmoils starting in the 1950s and lasting throughout 1960s. The exploration of anti-Semitism occurs throughout the entire book, even though the word: anti-Semitism or discrimination is not mentioned even once.
The form in which This Tilting World is written is unique; it is a combination of an autobiography and a novel, but it is neither just a novel nor just an autobiography. It is an elegy, a witness statement, a memoir, a passage from the history book where the narrator emphatically scrutinises different stages of her life – childhood, adolescence, adulthood – while living in Tunisia, and then in the exile in France. Through giving the voice to people who are already gone, Colette Fellous takes us on a Proustian journey of self-reflection on the meaning of home as well as individual and generational trauma.
The Tilting World is also a portrayal of various cultural, social and political changes in Tunisia taking place over the period of a few decades which forced the narrator’s Jewish – Tunisian family (and most if not all Jewish families) to leave Tunisia and seek the place they can call home somewhere else. The author reflects on the Jews’ great exodus from the Muslim countries starting around 1956 through 1967, with each political turmoil, the increase in tensions between communities was noticeable in addition to administrative hassles, the unjust imprisonment, the small but regular humiliations of the Jewish members of the society. This book constitutes an exploration of the immense impact that exile can have on the ones who are forced to leave their home, their cultural heritage.
Colette Fellous invites the reader to accompany her in this exploration. The reader is a silent but listening participant in this conversation between the narrator and her past, providing the foundation for creating almost a cathartic experience for all the parties.
Tunisia of the narrator’s childhood is the land of beauty, enchantment, light, warmth, vibrant colours, delicious dishes which is juxtaposed with Tunisia of her adulthood, the land of political turmoil and deterioration, a surge of radicalism, terrorism, emotional suffocation. France, even though far from perfect, is portrayed as a guarantor of safety and dignity for the Jewish community in Tunisia.
Following the attack on the beach in Sousse (Tunisia) in 2015 where the terrorist killed thirty-eight tourists, the narrator of The Tilting World is compelled to say a farewell to Tunisia through recalling memories of her childhood and those of her parents and passersby’s on the street, her ancestors who lived in this land for centuries.
Colette Fellous takes us through the stages of personal and family trauma. She recalls the recent death of her close friend as well as other recent atrocities including a terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan massacre, the hostage taking in the Jewish supermarket, people killed in the Parisian cafes: Belle Equipe, Carillon, Petit Cambodge, the terrorist attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, the chaos in Libya, the war in Syria, killings in Bamako (Mali) and in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), the brutal murder of the Jewish – French boy, Ilan Halimi in France which was ethnically, racially and ideologically motivated, the Toulouse and and Mountauban 2012 killings of the Jewish children, rabbi, French soldiers by the Islamic extremist. When reflecting on the attack in Sousse, the narrator remembers that the terrorist told the Tunisians that he was going to kill ‘only foreigners‘ – she recalls that the Jews of Tunisia were also referred to as ‘foreigners‘ during the previous political turmoil despite having lived in this land for centuries. The narrator also recounts the assassination of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist who was murdered by the Islamic extremists in 2002 and was forced to say “I am Jewish my father is Jewish my mother is Jewish” before his life was taken away by his captors.
The narrator asks how we as a human race came to these acts of barbarity and chaos. She questions her own upbringing and the innocence of her father resulting in her lack of preparation to witness the atrocities being committed in the world. Her father insisted on relying on kindness, morality, beauty, and justice.
“About barbarity and human chaos, about ugliness. You told us nothing of this, never a thing, not a word even about the camps, you did not want to hurt or frighten us, but your innocence – that too you passed on to us, and now we too are trapped, without arms or protection.”
Terrorist attack on the beach is Sousse which left thirty eight people dead was a culmination. The constant threat that the author had felt since her early childhood and explores it in depth in the book materialised into forty minutes of terror in 2015.
The narrator asks herself what terror and violence do to the society and its impact on the individual physical and emotional health? She contemplates the lives lost in all the terror attacks, people in the office, a supermarket, relaxing on the beach. She also remembers the lives lost in the Mediterranean sea and the recent death of her closed friend in the accident. How the ones who still live relate to the death of those who used to live around them?
Throughout This Tilting World the question on the meaning of History and its role in shaping and creating our lives is explored. The narrator reflects on the impact of becoming ‘a foreigner’ in your own country, a place of your birth, and the realisation that your ethnicity, religious denomination can define you as an enemy, in the eyes of some of your countrymen, despite you being born in the same place like they were.
“(…) I’d like to escape it, Id like to be elsewhere. I am not from here and I know that only by leaving will I save everything that lies before me now. (…) Why am I not one of them? No one explains this to us, we can only be there and understand (…). There I learned to read this alien land, alien, to the one where I thought I belonged, this land where we were in fact merely guests, though we only half realised it.”
The meaning of language is also addressed in the book. ‘Language’ is depicted as a mirror of the arduous journey the individual and their forebears had to make in search for the place called home. The narrator recalls memories of her grandparents in Tunisia speaking Italian and Ladino, her parents speaking Arabic as their first language, the narrator and her siblings speaking French. There is a beautiful passage on the narrator’s father’s ability to speak multiple languages with distinct accents reflecting the history of his life and that of his ancestors.
“ My father grew up here [Tunisia], without a true mother tongue, for his main language was Arabic yet he had to give that up to learn French at school, he then used it only to speak to his parents and, later on, his works and clients. Hebrew made its appearance only at the important ceremonites and Friday evenings (….). He never had any one whole language. They are all slightly contorted, his Arabic, his French, his Italian, he moves between languages with ease but often confuses them, and worse, they all come out in his own odd accent”.
Antisemitism is not mentioned by name in the book – but the narrator shares with us memories of times when as a child she heard appaling story of a Jewish person being beaten or attacked which resulted in the Jews vanishing from the public sphere of the Tunisian towns, streets; they made themesleves unnoticeable – once the anxiety dispearsed they would go out again and be a part of the Tunisian public. The narrator admits that as a child and adolescent in Tunisia, she lived in fear, ‘fear of an invisible violence’ – this is what shaped her. She sensed her parents’ fear and fragility in Tunisia that they inhabited since their birth and ‘perhaps even long before’. The author refers here to the generational trauma of her family and families similar to hers.
The narrator’s father had to leave Tunisia at the age of sixty to rebuild his life in France. The meaning of forced exile – it is not only leaving the geographical location – it also means leaving behind many gestures, smells, tastes, memories of one’s ancestors who contributed to this country. The narrator recounts that her father kept his suffering hidden away inside – he managed to avoid feeling too much pain or he rather pretended to hide his pain in order not to be a burden for others.
“I tried to talk too of how he left Tunisia. Was he still thinking about his shop, hadn’t he found it difficult to drop everything and leave with nothing? To leave at sixty and start all over again here? He did not reply. He said only it is fine, it’s fine. (…) My father never talked about this rupture. He came to Paris aged sixty-one, a few months after my mother, abandoning the country where his ancestors had lived for centuries. Within a few months, he had to abandon his life, his profession, his house, his habits, his music, his landscape and above all his shop, which was his whole life as he used to say. Not a word of this vital rupture, never a complaint, either from him or my mother. They both still wore the same shy smiles, so as not to trouble anyone, or lean on anyone, even when they were not all right at all (…) This is the story of so many exiles. (…) How were they able to bear leaving it all behind, for ever?”
Only the narrator struggles to leave Tunisia behind. Her parents and siblings never talk about the land of their ancestors. The author is eager to maintain this connection between her and Tunisia by visiting this country on a regular basis wanting “to set her feet back in the paths of the departed, come back to what they left in the city, in the fabric of the landscapes and the air, to talk with the thousands of names buried in the Borgel cemetery, to read the love poems inscribed in the tombs’ stone slabs, to stare at the hundred – year old eucalyptuses which were already there (…).”
The narrator further shares her feelings towards Tunisia decades after leaving and years after her parents passed away:
“Ways of seasoning a dish, of speaking and thinking at lightining speed, of savouring the briefest moment’s pleasures, of sighing, of bursting into laughter right after sighing and thinking themselves in heaven just then – yes, I wanted to feel all of this again, to feel it for them.”
Throughout This Tilting World there are many reference to literature and the larger question is asked about the meaning of literature and if a written word can merely heal a feeling of disillusionment and provide comfort for belief in meaningless utopia.
There is a plethora of references to the gentle voice of Roland Barthes, Proust, Flaubert, Maupassant, Rimbaud, Nietzche, Musil, Goethe, Borges, Zweig, Pontalis. The narrator shares her feelings on the role of books in her early life. It was The Wandering Life by Maupassant written at the end of the 19th century that allowed the narrator to better understand the diversity of Tunisia of that era and that of her youth. She recalls the music of Feyrouz, Umm Kulthum, Hedi Jouini, Abdel Wahab which was often played in the cafes and food stalls. Also, music of Beethoven, Pavarotti, and the Mexican folk singer Chavela Vargas and her famous decadent song “Somos” is used a point of reference.
Memories of traditional Tunisian food is another ingredient contributing to the narrator’s identity: “couscous with pomegranate seeds, a glass of tea, pistachios, almond biscuits”, “mint leaves at the bottom of a glass jar, warm semolina in a great Nabeul vase (…), the sweet grain is flavoured with cinnamon and orange -flower water; filling the base of the vase: pomegranate juice.”
As mentioned earlier this book is the love and farewell letter to Tunisia and meditation on connections that we create throughout our lives with places, people, food, music, literature, buildings – a sense of familiarity, belonging, simply ‘home’.
“I have also loved and still love this land that is Tunisia, with a strange and powerful love. I love the city of Tunis, the Carthage coast, La Marsa, Gammarth, the little villages of the south, the complexity of the society (…). I love to trace its history, it is unique in the Arab world.”
One comes away from this book with a profound sense of sadness and nostalgia. In This Tilting World, the narrator compassionately articulates personal and generational traumas resulting from the forced exile. This book encapsulates the meaning of home, and all the ingredients that make up one’s sense of belonging.
I can’t express enough how beautifully written this book is. I highly recommend it to everyone. This Tilting World by Colette Fellous is a literary feast.
“In Tunisia I was in exile, something rang false, I couldn’t put my finger on it, yet it genuinely was my native country (…). I learned young to be torn in two, not to be shocked by the feeling, to breathe through it. To love leaving and then returning, to be always between two or three cities, to keep several languages equally in play and even not to understand everything of a place in order better to grasp the sensations, the nuances.”
The Tilting World by the Tunisian – French writer, Colette Fellous is a beautiful, enriching book, an ode to the author’s home country, Tunisia, infused with lyricism, engulfed in a veil of melancholy and sadness, full of profound reflections on the meaning of home, forced exile, belonging, multiple identities, and loss as well as trauma, violence and history shaping one’s life.
As another atrocity is committed, the narrator of this book decides “to disengage” with her home country by leaving Tunisia behind. Reflecting on her own life, that of her parents and ancestors and drawing inspiration from many French literary masterpieces, the narrator pens down a story of resilience which takes shape of a love letter to her ‘home’ and her sense of belonging. Colette Fellous invites us to learn about Tunisia’s Jewish community and its exodus as a result of numerous political turmoils starting in the 1950s and lasting throughout 1960s. The exploration of anti-Semitism occurs throughout the entire book, even though the word: anti-Semitism or discrimination is not mentioned even once.
The form in which This Tilting World is written is unique; it is a combination of an autobiography and a novel, but it is neither just a novel nor just an autobiography. It is an elegy, a witness statement, a memoir, a passage from the history book where the narrator emphatically scrutinises different stages of her life – childhood, adolescence, adulthood – while living in Tunisia, and then in the exile in France. Through giving the voice to people who are already gone, Colette Fellous takes us on a Proustian journey of self-reflection on the meaning of home as well as individual and generational trauma.
The Tilting World is also a portrayal of various cultural, social and political changes in Tunisia taking place over the period of a few decades which forced the narrator’s Jewish – Tunisian family (and most if not all Jewish families) to leave Tunisia and seek the place they can call home somewhere else. The author reflects on the Jews’ great exodus from the Muslim countries starting around 1956 through 1967, with each political turmoil, the increase in tensions between communities was noticeable in addition to administrative hassles, the unjust imprisonment, the small but regular humiliations of the Jewish members of the society. This book constitutes an exploration of the immense impact that exile can have on the ones who are forced to leave their home, their cultural heritage.
Colette Fellous invites the reader to accompany her in this exploration. The reader is a silent but listening participant in this conversation between the narrator and her past, providing the foundation for creating almost a cathartic experience for all the parties.
Tunisia of the narrator’s childhood is the land of beauty, enchantment, light, warmth, vibrant colours, delicious dishes which is juxtaposed with Tunisia of her adulthood, the land of political turmoil and deterioration, a surge of radicalism, terrorism, emotional suffocation. France, even though far from perfect, is portrayed as a guarantor of safety and dignity for the Jewish community in Tunisia.
Following the attack on the beach in Sousse (Tunisia) in 2015 where the terrorist killed thirty-eight tourists, the narrator of The Tilting World is compelled to say a farewell to Tunisia through recalling memories of her childhood and those of her parents and passersby’s on the street, her ancestors who lived in this land for centuries.
Colette Fellous takes us through the stages of personal and family trauma. She recalls the recent death of her close friend as well as other recent atrocities including a terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan massacre, the hostage taking in the Jewish supermarket, people killed in the Parisian cafes: Belle Equipe, Carillon, Petit Cambodge, the terrorist attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, the chaos in Libya, the war in Syria, killings in Bamako (Mali) and in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), the brutal murder of the Jewish – French boy, Ilan Halimi in France which was ethnically, racially and ideologically motivated, the Toulouse and and Mountauban 2012 killings of the Jewish children, rabbi, French soldiers by the Islamic extremist. When reflecting on the attack in Sousse, the narrator remembers that the terrorist told the Tunisians that he was going to kill ‘only foreigners‘ – she recalls that the Jews of Tunisia were also referred to as ‘foreigners‘ during the previous political turmoil despite having lived in this land for centuries. The narrator also recounts the assassination of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist who was murdered by the Islamic extremists in 2002 and was forced to say “I am Jewish my father is Jewish my mother is Jewish” before his life was taken away by his captors.
The narrator asks how we as a human race came to these acts of barbarity and chaos. She questions her own upbringing and the innocence of her father resulting in her lack of preparation to witness the atrocities being committed in the world. Her father insisted on relying on kindness, morality, beauty, and justice.
“About barbarity and human chaos, about ugliness. You told us nothing of this, never a thing, not a word even about the camps, you did not want to hurt or frighten us, but your innocence – that too you passed on to us, and now we too are trapped, without arms or protection.”
Terrorist attack on the beach is Sousse which left thirty eight people dead was a culmination. The constant threat that the author had felt since her early childhood and explores it in depth in the book materialised into forty minutes of terror in 2015.
The narrator asks herself what terror and violence do to the society and its impact on the individual physical and emotional health? She contemplates the lives lost in all the terror attacks, people in the office, a supermarket, relaxing on the beach. She also remembers the lives lost in the Mediterranean sea and the recent death of her closed friend in the accident. How the ones who still live relate to the death of those who used to live around them?
Throughout This Tilting World the question on the meaning of History and its role in shaping and creating our lives is explored. The narrator reflects on the impact of becoming ‘a foreigner’ in your own country, a place of your birth, and the realisation that your ethnicity, religious denomination can define you as an enemy, in the eyes of some of your countrymen, despite you being born in the same place like they were.
“(…) I’d like to escape it, Id like to be elsewhere. I am not from here and I know that only by leaving will I save everything that lies before me now. (…) Why am I not one of them? No one explains this to us, we can only be there and understand (…). There I learned to read this alien land, alien, to the one where I thought I belonged, this land where we were in fact merely guests, though we only half realised it.”
The meaning of language is also addressed in the book. ‘Language’ is depicted as a mirror of the arduous journey the individual and their forebears had to make in search for the place called home. The narrator recalls memories of her grandparents in Tunisia speaking Italian and Ladino, her parents speaking Arabic as their first language, the narrator and her siblings speaking French. There is a beautiful passage on the narrator’s father’s ability to speak multiple languages with distinct accents reflecting the history of his life and that of his ancestors.
“ My father grew up here [Tunisia], without a true mother tongue, for his main language was Arabic yet he had to give that up to learn French at school, he then used it only to speak to his parents and, later on, his works and clients. Hebrew made its appearance only at the important ceremonites and Friday evenings (….). He never had any one whole language. They are all slightly contorted, his Arabic, his French, his Italian, he moves between languages with ease but often confuses them, and worse, they all come out in his own odd accent”.
Antisemitism is not mentioned by name in the book – but the narrator shares with us memories of times when as a child she heard appaling story of a Jewish person being beaten or attacked which resulted in the Jews vanishing from the public sphere of the Tunisian towns, streets; they made themesleves unnoticeable – once the anxiety dispearsed they would go out again and be a part of the Tunisian public. The narrator admits that as a child and adolescent in Tunisia, she lived in fear, ‘fear of an invisible violence’ – this is what shaped her. She sensed her parents’ fear and fragility in Tunisia that they inhabited since their birth and ‘perhaps even long before’. The author refers here to the generational trauma of her family and families similar to hers.
The narrator’s father had to leave Tunisia at the age of sixty to rebuild his life in France. The meaning of forced exile – it is not only leaving the geographical location – it also means leaving behind many gestures, smells, tastes, memories of one’s ancestors who contributed to this country. The narrator recounts that her father kept his suffering hidden away inside – he managed to avoid feeling too much pain or he rather pretended to hide his pain in order not to be a burden for others.
“I tried to talk too of how he left Tunisia. Was he still thinking about his shop, hadn’t he found it difficult to drop everything and leave with nothing? To leave at sixty and start all over again here? He did not reply. He said only it is fine, it’s fine. (…) My father never talked about this rupture. He came to Paris aged sixty-one, a few months after my mother, abandoning the country where his ancestors had lived for centuries. Within a few months, he had to abandon his life, his profession, his house, his habits, his music, his landscape and above all his shop, which was his whole life as he used to say. Not a word of this vital rupture, never a complaint, either from him or my mother. They both still wore the same shy smiles, so as not to trouble anyone, or lean on anyone, even when they were not all right at all (…) This is the story of so many exiles. (…) How were they able to bear leaving it all behind, for ever?”
Only the narrator struggles to leave Tunisia behind. Her parents and siblings never talk about the land of their ancestors. The author is eager to maintain this connection between her and Tunisia by visiting this country on a regular basis wanting “to set her feet back in the paths of the departed, come back to what they left in the city, in the fabric of the landscapes and the air, to talk with the thousands of names buried in the Borgel cemetery, to read the love poems inscribed in the tombs’ stone slabs, to stare at the hundred – year old eucalyptuses which were already there (…).”
The narrator further shares her feelings towards Tunisia decades after leaving and years after her parents passed away:
“Ways of seasoning a dish, of speaking and thinking at lightining speed, of savouring the briefest moment’s pleasures, of sighing, of bursting into laughter right after sighing and thinking themselves in heaven just then – yes, I wanted to feel all of this again, to feel it for them.”
Throughout This Tilting World there are many reference to literature and the larger question is asked about the meaning of literature and if a written word can merely heal a feeling of disillusionment and provide comfort for belief in meaningless utopia.
There is a plethora of references to the gentle voice of Roland Barthes, Proust, Flaubert, Maupassant, Rimbaud, Nietzche, Musil, Goethe, Borges, Zweig, Pontalis. The narrator shares her feelings on the role of books in her early life. It was The Wandering Life by Maupassant written at the end of the 19th century that allowed the narrator to better understand the diversity of Tunisia of that era and that of her youth. She recalls the music of Feyrouz, Umm Kulthum, Hedi Jouini, Abdel Wahab which was often played in the cafes and food stalls. Also, music of Beethoven, Pavarotti, and the Mexican folk singer Chavela Vargas and her famous decadent song “Somos” is used a point of reference.
Memories of traditional Tunisian food is another ingredient contributing to the narrator’s identity: “couscous with pomegranate seeds, a glass of tea, pistachios, almond biscuits”, “mint leaves at the bottom of a glass jar, warm semolina in a great Nabeul vase (…), the sweet grain is flavoured with cinnamon and orange -flower water; filling the base of the vase: pomegranate juice.”
As mentioned earlier this book is the love and farewell letter to Tunisia and meditation on connections that we create throughout our lives with places, people, food, music, literature, buildings – a sense of familiarity, belonging, simply ‘home’.
“I have also loved and still love this land that is Tunisia, with a strange and powerful love. I love the city of Tunis, the Carthage coast, La Marsa, Gammarth, the little villages of the south, the complexity of the society (…). I love to trace its history, it is unique in the Arab world.”
One comes away from this book with a profound sense of sadness and nostalgia. In This Tilting World, the narrator compassionately articulates personal and generational traumas resulting from the forced exile. This book encapsulates the meaning of home, and all the ingredients that make up one’s sense of belonging.
I can’t express enough how beautifully written this book is. I highly recommend it to everyone. This Tilting World by Colette Fellous is a literary feast.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 18, 2019
It was a good book. It did jump all over the place. The language was beautiful and it let me be able to picture Tunisia.
November 3, 2019
thoughts coming shortly
November 15, 2021
I found this a true thing of beauty. It felt like an amazing work of art in literary form from beginning to end. I tried reading parts of it out loud and hearing the words added to their strength. I am in awe of this work. It reads like the diary entries of someone struggling with difficult decisions; asking hard questions -- who am I, where do I belong, what is this thing called life and how did it feel for ones parents, grandparents and friends and especially for ones father.
On its surface readers will see the struggle of a Tunisian Jew who is torn between the country of her birth and France. In the end she shows that she is her fathers daughter and that this is just life. Could it be that after the centuries where her family had lived in this place that it had changed and there was no longer a place for her. Why had her family made France their home in a way that she found challenging? Or had they? So many questions. Wow!
On its surface readers will see the struggle of a Tunisian Jew who is torn between the country of her birth and France. In the end she shows that she is her fathers daughter and that this is just life. Could it be that after the centuries where her family had lived in this place that it had changed and there was no longer a place for her. Why had her family made France their home in a way that she found challenging? Or had they? So many questions. Wow!
October 31, 2025
I was intrigued by the premise of this book. When I started reading it, I wasn’t sure what kind of reading experience it was going to be, but it really grew on me and I wound up loving her writing, which is so evocative. It made me want to go to Tunisia and even to imagine that living there must be quite wonderful. It is a very meandering and imaginative kind of memoir and reckoning with the mass public violence of our age, following on the terrorist attacks in Paris and Tunisia, and personal loss through the ver recent death of a close friend and much earlier, her father. Shifting back and forth in time and place, she provides narrative pictures of her childhood in Tunisia, an adult life in Normandy, the lives of her parents and friends, the Jewish community of Tunisia, displacement and the search for home, and the impact of local and global events on our lives.
October 31, 2021
With the gentle, loving attention of a poet and the keen eye of a photographer, Fellous recaptures in every fleeting, melancholic detail a past that has been forever reshaped by the present. A beautiful book about the twists and turns of history, inevitable losses, the consolations of art and art-making, and how violence, religious and political, can shake a country to its core. Her words, chapters, flow, in and out, kind of like a tide, ceaselessly between memory and the moment- really just like in real life where each wave, each thought, intimation, emotion emerges into consciousness all too briefly before returning to the greater wholeness of the ocean. Thanks go to Mr B's bookshop in Bath for sending this to me.
April 15, 2022
Fellous writes in a stream-of-consciousness. There’s no white space, white space punctuation, for me to ruminate, reflect, take the details in. Does she want me to hurry? What a pity. I took quite a few breaks from it, a memoir that is depressing and slow in a way that is not beautiful, just tragic. And yet, the very last parts were really good, bringing me to a solid “it was OK”.
January 7, 2020
I LIKE THIS BOOK.
Read
April 29, 2020(Tunisia)
January 1, 2021
Although interesting and thought provoking the book doesn't build up enough emotional depth or attachment for me to have thoroughly enjoyed it.
December 10, 2019
This Tilting World is a mournful tribute to author Collette Fellous’s homeland, Tunisia. After years of traveling back and forth between Paris and Tunisia, it’s the attacks on the beach at Sousse, coinciding with the death of a precious friend and fellow writer, which prompts her to abandon Tunisia for Paris. With exquisite, adoring language, she captures the pull of memory and loss, recognizing a parallel between her inner struggle, that of her parents, as well as the refugees who cross the Mediterranean in search of a better life. Such a poignant and bittersweet book that will connect with anyone estranged from home.
September 10, 2020
Narrated by a French Tunisian Jew after a gunman murders tourists on the beach at Sousse in 2015, this novel is told in short, seemingly disjointed chapters, which brilliantly build up a kaleidoscopic picture of the narrator’s Jewish Tunisian parent’s and her life in Tunisia, followed by their exile/permanent move to France. The book is about her leave taking of Tunisia, which her parents had already prepared her for by providing her with a French education, but which the narrator had tried to stave off by making regular return visits.
I’m feverish, my life is parts and pieces, it consists of all these deaths, I must rebuild it to see it better, no one could have foreseen that our world would be so transformed, I’m begging: help me, it’s so you can help me that I’m writing this book.
I’m feverish, my life is parts and pieces, it consists of all these deaths, I must rebuild it to see it better, no one could have foreseen that our world would be so transformed, I’m begging: help me, it’s so you can help me that I’m writing this book.
September 3, 2019
It was a good read.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews