Leïla Slimani once told the New Yorker that she writes about what scares her the most about a short story she wrote from the point of view of a rapist.

Certainly, this self-perception also applies to her second novel, Then You Sleep Too, with which the writer, who was born in Rabat in 1981, became famous and for which she not only received the Prix Goncourt in 2016, but was promptly made Minister of Culture by President Macron. which she politely declined.

In this horror story about the nanny Louise, who murders the children entrusted to her in Paris, Slimani reversed the classic intersections of class and origin in a provocative way, in that the domestic worker was not from North Africa, as is so often the case in France, but the mother,

in whose service Louise was.

In retrospect, the latter would prove to be a forerunner of the French left behind who, two years later, made a name for themselves in Paris with their yellow vests.

Sandra Kegel

Responsible editor for the feuilleton.

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While this tale is characterized by short, jarring sentences that torment her readers through the drama, the trilogy Leïla Slimani has been working on since The Land of Others (2021) is of a different nature. From the pool of her own Moroccan ones Drawing on family history and the experiences of three generations, the second volume "Look how we dance" has just been published.

Right from the first pages, the atmospherically dense sentences catch the eye, which are multi-layered and shimmer like an oriental carpet.

Unlike “Then sleep too you”, which is limited in time and space like a chamber play, in this saga the author ferrantely goes both horizontally, by following the fate of countless people, and into the past.

The “lemon tree” in the garden of the Belhaj family, who run a farm in Meknes in northern Morocco, is the central metaphor of the first volume.

Amine, who is married to French Mathilde, said they were like this tree, half lemon, half orange, to describe their multiple identities.

The new novel tells of this inner conflict in the large political structure as well as in private life.

At the start in April 1968, the hybrid plant was felled first.

It has to make way for a swimming pool.

The garden, with its lavender and rosemary bushes, lilies and dahlias, has always been a shelter for Mathilde, yet it is she who insists on the pool because it symbolizes prosperity, modernity and a bright future.

It won't be long before Amine, who has resisted with all his might but is now bursting with money and complacency, celebrates the most pompous parties there and cheats on his wife.