Essay
Aden, Arabie
Aden Arabie
Paul Nizan · 1931
Synopsis
The book opens with a refusal to let it be said that twenty is the best age of life. A young graduate of the École normale supérieure leaves France and his teachers to go and teach, for a few months, the son of a French businessman in Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea. He thought he was fleeing conformism; in this trading town he finds the hierarchies he wanted to leave, and draws from it an indictment of the bourgeois society of his country.
Context
The book appeared from Rieder in 1931. It mixes pamphlet with travel narrative. Fallen into oblivion after its author's break with the Communist Party, it was reissued in 1960 by François Maspero, with a long preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, and became a cult book of the 1960s; its first sentence was taken up during the events of May 1968. The same preface accompanies the English translation by Joan Pinkham.
Who it is for
One hundred and fifty pages of violent prose, to be read in one sitting. The tone is that of the pamphlet, not of description: anyone looking for a travel narrative will have the wrong book.
Prizes and reception
The book appeared in English under the title Aden, Arabie in 1968, then was reissued in 1987 by Columbia University Press.
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