The Art of Losing

Naïma has always known that her family came from Algeria. Born in Normandy, now working in the art world in Paris, her knowledge of that foreign country is limited to her grandparents' tiny flat in a crumbling sink-estate in France, the food her grandmother Yema cooks, the precious things she and her husband Ali brought with them when they fled in 1962, just as Algeria was about to gain its independence. Naïma's father, Hamid - only a child when the family sailed from Algiers - won't talk about it. He says he remembers nothing.

Why did Ali have to leave? Was he a harki - an Algerian who worked for and sided with the French? The story is not what you might expect: to Ali, the only thing that mattered was securing his family's safety and security. How he went from the wealthy owner of an olive grove, to an immigrant scratching a living in France shows how ordinary people can find their lives overturned, according to the whims of those in power.

Hamid will remember nothing, because in France he made himself anew: education was his ticket out of the family home, the key to acceptance into French society, and the first step on a path that would lead him to a place so distant and so alien to his father, that eventually they would cease to recognize each other.

But now Naïma will see for herself: the gallery she works for is sending her to Algeria, and so for the first time since they left everyone and everything they knew and loved behind, since they were forced to seek refuge in the land of the oppressors, rather than remain with the newly freed, one of Ali's family is going back.

Alice Zeniter's The Art of Losing is the story of how people carry on in the face of loss: the loss of a country, an identity, a way to speak to your children. It's the story of three generations of one family, told over seventy years, and how in some ways, without knowing it, we are a product of the things we've lost.