Indictment of racism in France
Novel explores the bitter reality of many Arabs in French society
Sometimes the timing of a book’s release couldn’t be more appropriate. With the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, The Age of Reinvention, by Karine Tuil, is just such a book.
A great success in her native France, Tuil’s ninth novel about a Muslim Arab, Sam Tahar, passing himself off for a Sephardic Jew was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
Though not set in any particular time period, the novel fictionalizes a number of events that have made a profound impression on French society in recent years: riots in poor immigrant suburbs; anti-semitism and the case of a young Jew tortured and killed by a gang of Arab thugs; young jihadists in France; and the sex scandals of Dominique-Strauss Kahn.
The story she tells is this: Tahar’s meteoric ascent to the top of New York’s legal and corporate elite is built on a lie.
The Muslim son of Tunisian immigrants raised in Paris’s poorest and most notorious highrise suburbs, Samir (Sam) allows his potential employer, Pierre Lévy, to mistake him for a Sephardic Jew.
Later, when Samir is sent to New York to open a U.S. branch of Lévy’s law firm, he adopts the life story of his one-time best friend, Samuel Baron, a Jew whose parents were killed in a car accident.
Once in New York, Samir is taken into the fold by his Jewish partners, going so far as to marry and raise children with Ruth Berg, a prominent Jewish socialite who never questions Samir’s imposture.
Of course, Samir’s Gatsbyesque existence cannot last forever.
As Pierre says to him, quoting a Yiddish proverb: “With a lie you can go very far, but you can never go back.”
The Age of Reinvention is not always an easy read. Tuil’s writing is at times deliberately angry and disordered, spitting out phrases like a machine gun: “. . . the tragic echoes of the horror of his formative years spent inside the grimy walls . . . darkened basements where nobody ever went anymore out of fear of theft/rape/ violence, where nobody ever went unless threatened by a pistol/knife/box cutter/ knuckle duster/billy club . . . ”
It’s a style meant to reflect the bitter reality of so many Arabs in French cities, excluded as they are from the French ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity as a result of discrimination.
Tuil’s novel remains an important one, a scathing indictment of racism and discrimination in contemporary France.