Béni ou le Paradis privé

by Azouz Begag

Les profs trouvent qu'il s'en sort bien "pour un étranger". Les policiers s'adressent à lui en petit-nègre. Lui, il s'est choisi un drôle de nom, qu'il aime "parce que là, on voit pas que je suis arabe. Pas comme Ben Abdallah que je suis obligé de porter comme une djellaba toute la journée en classe."

Genres: France, Contemporary

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Azouz Begag is a French writer, politician and researcher in economics and sociology at the CNRS.

Begag has written approximately 20 literary books for adults and children, as well as songs. Furthermore, he is the scriptwriter of the French movie Camping à la ferme ("Camping at the farm"), where he exposed his vision of "three levels of riches" multiculturalism in today's French society : the advantages of its relatively new multiethnicity due to a new non-European immigration mixed with the basis of its historical and natural multiculturality whether coming from the riches of its several regional cultures and languages or from the successful integration of previous waves of European immigration during its history.

Reviews

[Amina (ⴰⵎⵉⵏⴰ) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Béni ou le Paradis privé" est un roman qui s'intéresse à des thématiques telles que l'immigration, l'identité culturelle et les obstacles rencontrés par les personnes issues de l'immigration.
Issu lui-même de l'immigration, Azouz Begag a surement puisé dans ses expériences personnelles pour nous livrer ce récit.
Au fil des pages, on fait la connaissance de Benabdellah (fils du serviteur de Dieu) alias Béni, un français d'origine algérienne, qui, inconsciemment, ne cesse de se chercher, déchiré entre l'Algérie de ses parents à laquelle il n'arrive pas à s'identifier, et la France, le pays où il est né mais considéré comme un étranger.
Comme dans beaucoup de ses œuvres , Azouz Begag explore dans "Béni ou le paradis privé" les questions d'identité, de discrimination, d'immigration ainsi que l'intégration des jeunes issus de l'immigration en France.
Un court roman à ne pas rater.

[Cait Alunan]

This was an easy read for the most part. The toughest part was deconstructing all the french and making sense of the storyline while keeping in mind the colloquialisms and that jazz

[Katha Gefe · Rating 3 out of 5]

das isch en wertvolle iblick is lebe vomne ander mensch gsi :3

[Jemima · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cannot give a good review as I was using it to practice reading in French. It was interesting enough despite not understanding a fair bit of it. The themes it is based on were very interesting.

[Steph Driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for French class. Brilliant story displaying themes of race and identity and the complexity of Béni growing up as the son of immigrants in France right after the Algerian war.

[Frumenty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This small novel gives an insight into the intimate lives of French-Algerien children in the banlieues of Lyon in, I would guess, the late 60s or early 70s. The protagonist / narrator Ben Abdallah, who prefers to be called Béni, is an overweight adolescent who, though he is doing well at school, is engaged in a daily struggle to find his place in French society. I'm not quite sure that this is what is called a "coming of age novel"; it's more a coming into one's identity novel - at the last moment of the novel, the blonde girl Béni loves, France (no prize for guessing the significance of that) takes him by the hand and they walk boldly forward together. fr.m.wikipédia.org calls this novel « le roman de sa jeunesse », but it doesn't seem to reveal much about the public figure. Azouz Begag is a well-known centrist politician who was a minister during the premiership of Dominique de Villepin.

The representation of life in a family whose culture and beliefs are so diametrically different from French culture and beliefs is instructive; as a Christian atheist (ie. an atheist raised as a Christian), I am curious about scepticism and secularism in other cultures, especially Islamic cultures. A little boy's unflattering comparison of his family's religion with that of the French, a religion that celebrates childhood (at Christmas) by putting on entertainment and giving gifts, is comic; in particular the remark that the only festivity for children in Islam involves cutting a part of them off. From the mouth of a child the criticism is sufficiently oblique, I suppose, not to have drawn the ire of the fundamentalists; or perhaps such people don't read novels.

Anyway, though it is slight the novel is diverting at times, but don't expect too much.