With Berlin’s International Literature Festival, another cultural event made tentative steps back to normality last month. I read with great interest Leïla Slimani’s opening speech in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and fortunately it has made its way into the wide world with an English translation in pdf format available here. Also, I suppose in the interest of the “International …” bit, Slimani delivers her address in English so I have embedded the YouTube video (54:00) below. (I have to say, with opening passages that invites her listeners to join her in a thought experiment, Slimini immediately outs herself as a Virginia Woolf acolyte; for such is a technique not dissimilar to that which Woolf often used in her speeches (including those that were to form the basis of “A Room of One’s Own”). Sure enough Woolf is quickly catapulted to center stage; the direct quotes come from a wonderful 931 essay called “Professions for Women” – to be read here, and found in many anthologies of her work.)
A star of the literary scene in Europe and beyond, Leïla Slimani carefully constructs an argument that is concerned with some of the contemporary tendencies; ones that stifle constructive discourse and shy at the complexities of literature. Having encouraged us to (do a Virginia Woolf) and brutally kill off the angels within; she reminds us of the fates of the famous, the notorious, the literary heroines of yore; how little girls are molded to fit an ideal and come of age conditioned to please and in fear of transgression; how our voices are so often curtailed or silenced. And it is here, and with her own experiences, she connects with the fashionable preoccupation of renegotiating the past, of speaking at one’s own peril! For, she maintains, we must speak up, and without trepidation, without fear of reprisal (yes, of being cancelled.) Writers and artists (but we all really) must have the freedom to break down walls and resist categorizations and assumptions – and this can only be achieved when we are in command of our voice. There is more, so whether watched or read or both, Ms. Slimani’s words are well worthy of our time and thought.
Having now done so, and following the recent talk surrounding Slimani’s new book, In the Country of Others, the first of a trilogy and this one set mostly in post-World War II Morocco, and with very much familial biographical elements, I surprise myself by the realization that I have not read any of her work (slender though it is; to date only three novels) – even successfully “not reading” Lullaby (The Perfect Nanny in the US) her controversial, prize-winning and best-selling novel of a children-murdering nanny (well, that’s the short version, presumably there is much more to it than that). Why I deemed this a success on my part I couldn’t say. Subject matter? Aversion to hype? The first would imply an over-sensitivity that I would be quick to deny; the second, an affliction that I have often overcome. Whatever the reason, its status suggested it as an appropriate literary starter. But alas, at least here in Germany, it remains so popular that I must wait my turn at the local library.
However, the German translation of her 2015 first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogres, which was published outside France in 2019 after the success of Lullaby, was available. All das zu verlieren, meaning literally in English “everything to lose” and which was published as Adèle in English, was certainly a difficult introduction to this lauded writer. Normally, perhaps, I would have read the dust-jacket blurb and thought: well, rather not. (I swear I am of an age where I struggle with contemporary twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings with husbands or wives and/or lovers, kids, parents – none of whom understand them – doing what they sincerely believe to be radical!) What could this Adèle, for that is the thirty-something (with husband and child, et cetera) subject’s name, have to say to me?
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