Author(s): Colette Fellous

History | Read our reviews! | Africa | Literature | France | Jewish History | Les Fugitives | Novel | Translated fiction

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia: on the night after the terrorist attack killing thirty-eight tourists on the nearby beach of Sousse, a woman sits facing the sea, and attempts to take stock. Personal tragedies soon resurface, the unexpected deaths of a dear friend - a fellow writer who died just weeks ago at sea, having forsaken the work that had given his life meaning - and of her father, a quiet man who had left all that he held dear in Tunisia to emigrate to France in his later years.
Through childhood memories and the prism of modern French classics, the story of Tunisia's Jewish community is pieced together. Shifting from Tunisia to Paris to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, Colette Fellous embarks on a Proustian lyrical journey, in which she gives voice to loved ones silenced by death and to those often unheard in life. Her love letter and adieu to her native country becomes an archive - or refuge - for stories of human resilience.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“Tomorrow, yes, I will leave this house. I’ll abandon the village and the life here, all the faces that I love I will leave.” Following the death of a friend at sea and the murder of 38 people on her local beach at Sousse in 2015, Fellous determines that she will leave her native Tunisia, this time for good. “Even if leaving tears me apart, even if leaving destroys me, I cannot do anything else.” For those, like Fellous, whose business is words, exile, the preparation for exile, and whatever is carried into exile must consist primarily of words, and Fellous determines to write “this book that I mean to finish before daybreak, as a farewell gesture to the country.” She has found herself inseparable from Tunisia, but she has “come back to see, in order more easily to disengage.” Handling object after object, she stows her memories ready for departure, not only her own memories of growing up in Tunisia’s ancient but shrinking Jewish community, of leaving to further her (formal and informal) education in France as a teenager, of repeatedly returning to the country of her birth, but also those of her parents, especially those of her father, who left Tunisia for Paris in his sixties and never returned nor spoke of the life he had left behind, and who has recently died of a heart attack. In preparation for leaving the past behind, Fellous sets out to heal, through words, through memory, her parents’ “deep wordless wound of having left their country so brutally, as if it were a natural step: this they kept in silence, folded deep inside, like so may others, not daring to touch on or venture near it; and this I meant to feel in my turn. This they had passed down to me, it had become my wound. And perhaps, after all, it was this I had sought to treat by returning, by trying to recover their childhood.” Using a method that owes something to Proust and a style that owes something to Rimbaud (exquisitely translated into English by Sophie Lewis), Fellous’s beautiful prose moves delicately, like the most tentative and searching thought, around and between entities in her memory that are either too fragile or too awful to be approached directly. In this way she achieves what she calls, after Barthes, her “struggle for softness,” her overcoming of violence by rejecting the language of violence. “It was Barthes, there’s no question, more than my parents, who taught me to read the world, to leave nothing in limbo. All things observed, all words spoken, every silence between two words, every link between two sentences.” Fellous’s approach to draw together all elements: times, people, objects, memories, sensations; to pack her book with the great cluster of experiences that comprise what it is to be herself, to show with words how a mind can approach and encompass these experiences, all the while knowing that the past is being squeezed out of the present, excluded from a world that is changing. “Could all of us, perhaps, without knowing it, the French, the Italians, the Maltese, the Jews, the Greeks, the Muslims of this country, we who watch and play together in this cafe, in this small nowhere-town, yes, could all of us already be refugees, already hostages or prisoners, or even disappeared?” Human well-being is a precious, fragile, evanescent thing, easily destroyed, she knows. “What to make of this violence, all those dead on the beach, all the dead everywhere, they are in me, haunting my lips and my eyes.” Those expelled from their own lives have only memories as their possessions: “This is the story of so many exiles, of all those who today cross the Mediterranean and die at sea, in their thousands they go, are lost in their thousands, their story is ours too, it tugs at our hearts.” Fellous knows that she must leave Tunisia, in order to prevent her memories from being overwritten by an unaccommodating world: “I know that only by leaving will I save everything that lies before me now.” She completes her book, her memory-luggage, and departs. But, in the end, even this last leaving is uncertain: “I knew I could not do it — I couldn’t help it, I would always be returning.” 

Reviews:
`Colette Fellous' beautiful book, humming and dancing with sensual intelligence, newly vivid in Sophie Lewis's deft, delicate, agile version, takes change and translation as its very themes. It asks us to imagine leaving home, searching for a new home. That home may simply be language itself, a web of knotted meanings. However, if that web serves as a rope bridge slung between places and people, and the bridge is cut and falls, survival is put at stake. This Tilting World explores how, after such a rupture, one woman tries to re-compose the meanings of her life and thereby go on living.' (Michele Roberts).
`Fragments: the result of dispersion, of destruction perhaps - but also the indispensable ingredients for a promise of reparation. This duality lies at the heart of the final volume of Colette Fellous's work of remembrance... merely giving shape to intimate material, from which to look out on the world, and welcome in the outside.... Faced with hopeless violence, the mind's eye keeps watch and goes on to foster the struggle for softness that Colette Fellous learnt from Barthes, so that the moment of hiatus is calm and bright - a redemption. This book probes our reaction in the face of a world in shreds.' (Le Monde Des Livres).
`A bewitching, hallucinatory elegy to home and exile, love and death, memory and loss. In precise, haunting prose, Fellous evokes the places and relationships, smells and sounds that make up this jigsaw of memories, set against the violence of contemporary events in Tunisia and France.' (Natasha Lehrer). `Colette Fellous (...) has two homelands: her birthplace, Tunisia, and her language, French. Between them is an arc, a tension, an energy: that of a double belonging which does not alienate but provides an opening.' (Le Monde).
`[Fellous] enchants with her way of capturing emotions, sensations, moments, and people. She elegantly opens the doors to the past.' (Livres Hebdo). `...a reflection-sensitive and honest-on our present, this impossible present, this threshold between yesterday and a complex future, where we "see how our own lives have been entirely created by political history despite our thinking that they were ours alone, that they were `personal'".' (Diacritik).
`Beyond the sadness and the loss, is a great seductive energy - we are drawn by a wish to live and to learn - and Fellous's inimitable way of regarding the world.' (Madame Figaro for Un amour de frere).
`Without nostalgic yearning, lithe and fluid in her way of capturing the coruscating nature of words, Fellous weaves past and present into a labyrinth of a book in which she shares her passions: writing, tuning herself to the world and untangling with relish the threads of reality and of thought.' (Le Magazine Litteraire for La preparation de la vie).
`Like a true disciple of Barthes, Colette Fellous works in fragments which she stiches together with infinite delicacy, inlaying the fabric of the text with black and white photographs, embroidering its surface with precious details; a sensual constellation of memories, colours and scents... The self as a fragment becomes an art, elegant and sensitive, as Colette Fellous returns to the vestiges of the past.' (Les Inrockuptibles for La preparation de la vie).

Author Biography: Colette Fellous is the author of more than twenty novels, including Aujourd'hui (2005) for which she received the Prix Marguerite Duras, and La preparation de la vie (2014) in which she pays homage to her mentor Roland Barthes. A publisher and former radio producer for France Culture, she lives between France and Tunisia, and is also a photographer. This Tilting World is her first book published in English. Sophie Lewis translates from French and Portuguese. She has translated Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Ayme, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Leila Slimani, Noemi Lefebvre (shortlisted in 2018 for the Scott Moncrieff Prize), Sheyla Smanioto and Joao Gilberto Noll, among others.