The Art of Losing

by Alice Zetiner

434 pages, Unknown Binding

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Left it on the bus - gutted!!!!! Based on the 150 or so pages I read I would give this a whopping four stars!!!! I knew next to nothing about the French occupation of Algeria but it was a very insightful read and I loved how it balanced war, love, family and how difficult it must have been to choose a side.

[Geof Sewell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel centres on the history of the harkis, North African volunteers who served as auxiliaries in the French Army. They and even their descendants were seen as traitors in Algeria. Thousands were killed in the well-known atrocities during and after the war of independence. I chose to read it to prepare for the complexities of a project to settle a refugee family in our town. What makes it original is that it sees immigration as an intergenerational issue. It has three main characters: Ali, who joined the French Army during the Second World War but was forced to flee his olive groves in the mountains of Kabyle as civil war erupted in the 1960s; his son Hamid and his Westernised granddaughter Naima who returns to Kabyle in the 2010s
The novel uses delicacy and contrast, opening with a fanciful tale of the art of winning. In a providential flood, Ali grabs a wooden olive press from a flooded river and makes his fortune, pressing his neighbours’ oil and buying more land. We never know what he did to antagonise the nationalists or whether he was simply denounced for taking a pension from the French Army. The family escapes and is interned near the Perpignan salt lakes, in a tent city, which had previously served as a Nazi concentration camp.
As a child, Hamid suffered nightmares: barbed wire handcuffs and burning tyres around prisoners’ necks, but as he grows up, he is unsure he ever witnessed such events. Too young to read Arabic before he left, it is not until he is 11 that he learns to read and write French. As a special reward for his rapid but belated breakthrough, he is given a French translation of “Five go to Kirrin Island”.
Hamid’s daughter, Naima, is proudly independent and leads a conventionally adventurous sex life. The charming and manipulative owner of the gallery where she works (and her intermittent lover) may only have hired her to persuade an artist who came from Kabyle to let him mount a retrospective exhibition of his work. Naima knows that in returning, she could be risking her life. Some of Ali's family fear that she will reclaim the land, but it is curiosity that drives her. As so often in this novel, communication almost breaks down, but Alice Zeniter handles such confusion with tact and humanity: “You don’t have bzzz fil in Francia?” Malika asks in the language of Babel on which their scant communication depends.

[Éilis Treacy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a great book but I found it too long for me. It kept me interested for sure but I found it a bit too long.