Publishers Weekly
01/18/2021
In Zeniter’s ruminative latest (after Take This Man), a French Algerian woman unearths her shrouded family history and reckons with the question of what constitutes a homeland. Ali, a veteran of the WWII French auxiliary, has built a sizable olive oil business in Algeria, but flees for France with his family after Algeria wins its independence. Ali’s eldest son, Hamid, assimilates into French culture and distances himself from his family, while Naima, Hamid’s art historian daughter, who endures bigotry after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other acts of terrorism, delves headlong into research on Algeria in preparation for an art exhibit by expatriate Algerian artist Lalla Fatma N’Soumer. During their interviews, she struggles to grasp the stories Lalla tells her about Algeria while piecing together an understanding of her own identity, given that Hamid had refused to take her to Algeria as a child. A trip to a museum in Tizi Ouzi provides cover for a search for information about Ali, but on the way she worries how she’ll be treated as a descendent of French allies. Zeniter skillfully demonstrates the impact of colonialism on family, country, and the historical archive. With nuance and grace, this meditative novel adds to the understanding of a complex, uncomfortable era of French history. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Winner of the Dublin Literary Award
A Most Anticipated Book of 2021: The Millions, The New York Times' "Globetrotting"
Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and Le Monde's Literary Prize
A Sunday Times Translated Book of the Month Pick
"Ms. Zeniter’s extraordinary achievement is to transform a complicated conflict into a compelling family chronicle, rich in visual detail and lustrous in language. Her storytelling, splendidly translated by Frank Wynne, carries the reader through different generations, cities, cultures, and mindsets without breaking its spell... With The Art of Losing, Ms. Zeniter shows fiction’s power as a hedge against loss of the past: the art of regaining."
—Liesl Schillinger, The Wall Street Journal
“If you think of historical fiction as a way of translating the past, does your perspective change when that fiction has been translated from another language? . . . This added dimension can make a book even richer, even more provocative. And none demonstrates that better than . . . The Art of Losing.”
—Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review
"Remarkable... superbly handled… It speaks urgently to our times.”
—The Sunday Times
"Visceral... An incredible [book]... that requires rapt attention. It is a novel that scales the walls of history and excavates lessons with curiosity and anger."
—The Observer
“From Algeria to France over the span of three generations, this transporting novel explores the impacts of colonialism, war, and immigration, but also family history. It asks the question, ‘Where are you really from?’ and follows the protagonist as she tries to discover it for herself, instead of letting others define her.”
—Karin Tanabe, Entertainment Weekly
“[The Art of Losing is] a testament to how the human spirit carries on in the face of loss.”
—Sarah Barrell, National Geographic Traveler
“Both packed and propulsive, this stunning multigenerational tale originating in the Algerian War of Independence offers a necessary history lesson (without feeling like one), important context regarding the consequences of colonialism, and concise portraiture of the personal struggle for identity.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, starred review
"This pacy, complex piece of historical fiction... explores the tangled reality of identity."
—The New Statesman
"France, like Britain, hardly lacks for migrant fictions now, but Zeniter traces their lonely passage exceptionally well. Her fine-grained scenes unroll into a grander historical canvas. The translator Frank Wynne, in another stellar outing, stylishly catches both her intimate and epic notes... With its panoramic vision and generous spirit, The Art of Losing finds shoots of hope amid the stony landscapes of the past."
—The Spectator
“Absorbing… as Chimamanda Adichie did in Half of a Yellow Sun, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor with Dust, Alice Zeniter joins the ranks of these authors in filling silences, whether individual or collective.”
—The East African
“Both a classic tale of the immigrant experience and a meditation on how that experience reverberates through generations of a family.”
—Margaret Quamme, Booklist, starred review
“Zeniter’s narrative … is densely packed with fact and feeling about Algeria’s often difficult relationship with France and France’s difficult relationship with Algerians... the novel provides a crash course in a contemporary problem with historical roots. Where are you from? Zeniter’s family saga addresses this question and a more difficult one: What if you don’t know?”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In Zeniter’s ruminative latest (after Take This Man), a French Algerian woman unearths her shrouded family history and reckons with the question of what constitutes a homeland. … Zeniter skillfully demonstrates the impact of colonialism on family, country, and the historical archive. With nuance and grace, this meditative novel adds to the understanding of a complex, uncomfortable era of French history.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The best book I read in 2020 . . . Through this masterful novel, [Alice Zeniter] created space for thinking through nations, politics, family, love and transmissions, while bringing some much-needed nuance and humanity to this period of our recent history.”
—Bad Form
“The Art of Losing is itself a perfectly rendered novel.”
—Airelle Perrouin, PopMatters
“Despite its weighty subject matter—and lacerating critique of the dominant culture —The Art of Losing is written with great empathy and is frequently very funny.”
—Ian Nixon, New Internationalist
“The Art of Losing is an exceptional novel, a masterful meditation on the negative space of history. With surgical control and deep emotional precision, Alice Zeniter tells the story of a family at once severed from and forever tethered to its past, survivors of colonialism’s residual wreckage. There is about this book the sense of literature’s great upending power, a brilliant light cast on the lives of those who, in the grand current of geopolitics, would otherwise be confined to shadows.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of American War
“A captivating exploration of the unspoken stories of the Algerian War.”
—Jean Birnmaum, Le Monde
“It is impossible not to be hit right in the heart.”
—Laurence Caracalla, Le Figaro Magazine
“A story that has never before been told.”
—Anne Haeming, Der Spiegel
“A powerful family saga . . . [Alice Zeniter] shows how history is passed down from generation to generation, in stories pockmarked by what’s left unsaid.”
—Elisabeth Philippe, L’Obs
“Addictive . . . A vivid family fresco.”
—Jean-Baptiste Hamelin, Page des libraires
“A deeply human story about the specters of identity and decolonization.”
—Vanity Fair (France)
“A masterfully conceived and brilliantly written chronicle that distills the tensions on both sides of the Mediterranean into a timely family saga.”
—Dirk Fuhrig, Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Kirkus Reviews
2020-12-26
What if the world identifies you as being something you don’t know anything about?
Naïma, a young French gallery worker, spends her days drifting between alcohol-fueled despair and bliss, unable to identify the nagging uncertainty about her roots that lurks at the edge of her consciousness. Born in France, the daughter of Hamid, an Algerian immigrant, and Clarisse, the daughter of a “traditional” French family, Naïma is aware of her Algerian identity but uninformed about its meaning (to herself and to the rest of the world) primarily due to her father’s purported lack of any memories about his early childhood years. After terrorist attacks in France, unspoken, but not unfelt, worries about the perception of darker skinned “Arab” residents prompt Naïma to wonder what others think of her and of her elderly Algerian grandmother. An opportunity to visit Algeria in order to prepare for an exhibit at the gallery where she works allows Naïma to explore the multigenerational effects of colonization, immigration, discrimination, and deracination—the most corrosive of these forces—on her family. Naïma’s and Hamid’s stories are told in turn but only after the history of Hamid’s father, Ali, as well as the disturbing aftermath of the choices he and others made during the course of Algeria’s war for independence. An unnamed and invisible narrator occasionally breaks through the fourth wall of Zeniter’s narrative, which is densely packed with fact and feeling about Algeria’s often difficult relationship with France and France’s difficult relationship with Algerians. Awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (a sort of junior version of France’s esteemed literary prize, voted upon by lycée students), the novel provides a crash course in a contemporary problem with historical roots.
Where are you from? Zeniter’s family saga addresses this question and a more difficult one: What if you don’t know?
