Literature without borders
Another story of Algeria with the American writer Alice Kaplan
American writer Alice Kaplan in the studio at RFI (May 2022).
© Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint/RFI
By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint
1 min
American writer, academic and historian, Alice Kaplan has worked on memory, autobiography and archives concerning the post-war French literary scene.
After taking an interest in Albert Camus' Algeria in
In Quest of the Stranger,
Alice Kaplan crossed the Mediterranean to write her first novel
Maison Atlas
, which was published simultaneously in France, by Le Bruit du Monde;
and in Algeria, published by Barzakh.
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French edition of the novel Maison Atlas © Le Bruit du Monde
Novel translated from the American by Patrick Hersant.
"
In the early 1990s, Emily left Minnesota to settle in Bordeaux.
On the benches of the university, she meets Daniel Atlas, an Algerian Jew with whom she falls in love.
He is still only a young dandy when the civil war tears his country apart, forcing him to leave Emily and France.
Back in El Biar, the neighborhood of his childhood, Daniel finds his parents isolated and threatened.
This illustrious family of merchants, who knew Algeria, which was colonized then independent, chose to stay on this land against all odds.
Many years later, Becca, a young American, will also travel to Algiers to better understand their lineage.
In a virtuoso composition, Alice Kaplan, writer and expert on Albert Camus, demonstrates that a novel can be the most beautiful lesson in history.
(Presentation of
Le Bruit du Monde
editions )
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