The Belly of the Atlantic
Publisher
:
Anne Carrière
Parution date
:
2003
EAN
:
9782843372384
Description
This beautifully written French best-seller (#1 on the L’Express list) explores the lives of two family members trying to connect across the Atlantic Ocean. Salie, the first-person female narrator, is an illegitimate Senegalese child who made her way to France to embark on a difficult writing career. Her younger brother, Madické, would like nothing more than to join her and pursue his dream of becoming a professional soccer player. But Salie is all too aware of the dangers and difficulties involved, and warns him through a series of short, expensive, infrequent, and soccer-centered phone conversations. These clipped exchanges are surrounded by Salie’s wonderfully told portraits of daily life in her home town, Niodor. She recounts the story of her own education by the eccentric village school teacher, of those who went abroad and succeeded, and the haunting story of a young Senegalese man – eerily similar to Madické – who did not. The book is a poignant, often humorous meditation on what it feels like to belong to two vastly different worlds, and to feel like a stranger in both of them. As one reviewer put it: “Neither a political manifesto, nor a plea for a free and independent Africa, nor an essay on immigration, this book is above all else a novel of shimmering colors and expressive imagery, written by an author whom we will surely talk about in the future” (Paris Match, September 2003).
Author
Fatou Diome : Like her novel, Fatou Diome is a warm blend of Africa and France, of small town and large city. She was born in 1968 in Niodior, a small island in Senegal. At 22, she moved to France, where she pursued a doctorate in modern literature at the University of Strasbourg. Her first novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (Anne Carrière, 2003; Serpent’s Tail, 2004), was a great commercial and media success and has been excerpted in the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, to be published in May 2009. Her other works include the novel Kétala (Flammarion, 2006) and a collection of short-stories entitled La Préférence Nationale (Présence africaine, 2001).
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