So Close

by Hélène Cixous

In So Close , the internationally renowned writer Hélène Cixous recounts a return to her native Algeria after a more than thirty-year absence.  Before she can decide to go, she must sift through large parts of her past in a land where she never felt at home and, from a young age, knew she must leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her mother’s rejection of the country that had rejected her despite years of devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is struggling with this decision, she receives a message from Zohra Drif, with whom she has had no contact since their school days, which was just before Zohra joined the Algerian FLN and become a heroine in the uprising against French rule in her homeland. They meet in Paris for the first time in more than fifty years and soon afterward the narrator departs for Algiers. The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations, impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits sites from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of her birth, the city of the family’s happiness before her father’s death when she was a young girl. The quest to find his grave again in the overgrown Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads to a startlingly moving scene that closes the voyage and the book.

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am completely enamoured with Cixous; but this translation was just so terrible that it ruined the book for me.

[Michael]

This book explores Cixous' visit to where she was born, through memory, fable, writing that is dream-like. Her meeting of Zohra Drif in the middle, after attending 4 years of secondary school with her in the 1950s, was the highlight. This book complements Drif's own telling of the war for independence in her Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter.

[Gil Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing tension between wanting to go ( return) to Algeria the land she was born on and not wanting to go, the lend she felt estranged on, and where her dad is burried but her mother and brother were expulsed from in 1971.
Before her mother's death, she longed to visit; afterward, she wished to return to Osnabrück, her mother's birthplace.

[Mohammed Yusuf · Rating 4 out of 5]

حكاية شخصية بسرد رائع متلعثم في قرارة الوسط الدولوزي حيث القلق والتوتر مكمن الإبداع تندفق عبرها اسئلة الهوية الفقد العائلة والصداقة

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

"the unbearable sensation of never finding myself inside but as if pinned to the outside of the inside, like a caterpillar forbidden to metamorphose"

I agree with others that this is not the best Cixous book to read -- it was only mildly mind-blowing for me.

Cixous explores her "allgeriance" -- her complex roots in Algeria in this book. The scene of the mother in the bathing suit is marvellous. Many of the other scenes -- even in the cemetery -- fell a little flat for me.

Definitely not a book for people new to Cixous -- read Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing or Stigmata: Escaping Texts instead.

[Melusine Parry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Premier Cixous que j'aie lu. Pas très convaincue.