Novel
Tattooed Memory
La Mémoire tatouée
Abdelkébir Khatibi · 1971
Synopsis
The narrator retraces his life from his birth, on a day of Eid al-Adha that gave him his first name and makes him imagine Abraham's gesture of cutting his son's throat. He moves from his earliest childhood memories to the threshold of adulthood, through the Berber, Arab, Quranic and French cultures that mingle in him and that he tries to unite, like a tattoo, in a single story. The narrative follows him to the Paris of the Latin Quarter, between discussions of Robbe-Grillet and Godard, the books of Vian and nights spent with Moroccan friends.
Context
The book appeared from Denoël in 1971, in the Les Lettres nouvelles series, three years after the academic study that had made its author known, and was reissued in 10/18 in 1979. The English publisher describes it as at once a coming-of-age novel, an anticolonial treatise and an experiment in language, written by a man for whom colonisation was a childhood memory. Hassan Wahbi has shown how the proper name, placed in the very first sentence, sets the rhythm of the opening of the narrative.
Who it is for
An autobiographical narrative in French, of about two hundred pages, in which every page plays with vocabulary and syntax: it demands an attentive reader.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first novel; translated into English by Peter Thompson in 2016 under the title Tattooed Memory.
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