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  • Today, "How to get out of the world" by Marouane Bakhti published on March 30, 2023 by Éditions les Nouvelles Éditions du réveil.

Alain Raimbault, author and contributor to the reading group 20 Minutes Books, recommends "Comment sortir du monde" by Marouane Bakhti, published on March 30, 2023 by Éditions les Nouvelles Éditions du réveil.


His favorite quote:

Because, in the total fear of not getting into their sentences that lock, when I arrive in worlds where I can not evoke everything that constitutes me: I do not want to tell my life. I don't say anything about myself. I feel like I'm always completely inadequate, always surprising. It's a place I can't find. A place that I am looking for but that does not exist. People don't make me space. And I hear horrors, horrible things about Arabs."

Why this book?

  • Because this novel tackles head-on, in a poetic, lyrical, almost romantic and raw language at the same time, complex questions about identity. The character-narrator seeks his place in France in a family with dual origins: French and Moroccan. How to be one without denying the other? Or how to be both? Do we have to make a choice, in short? Impossible balancing act in which our young hero gets lost.
  • Because in addition to being born of a mixed couple with the family and social tensions that this engenders, the main character is homosexual. He spends his childhood trying to hide it from his friends, from his father, who will of course discover the truth and will not accept it. The hero of this novel feels torn between who he really is and the rejection of his father, in addition to being lost between two uninhabitable cultures.
  • Because this novel, the first of this author, is a real cry, of pain, revolt and beauty that sometimes made me think of the "Notebook of a return to the native country", a long poem also written in his twenties by Aimé Césaire. Marouane Bakhti, in a few pages, addresses a thousand and one questions about the human condition that can not leave indifferent. He speaks to us the truth. A real tour de force.

The essentials in 2 minutes

The plot. The main character feels different, misunderstood, even rejected by his father. He will try to reconcile with him while trying to reconcile with himself, to finally find inner peace. A long quest for identity strewn with disappointments and misunderstandings.

The characters. The narrator; his Moroccan father, exiled in France; his French mother; family; Her lovers

Places. Western France; Paris; Morocco

The time. Over the last twenty years

The author. Marouane Bakhti was born in Nantes in 1997. He has been a baker and model, and has contributed to various magazines. This book is his first novel.

This book was read blown away by poetry, stirred by the torments of the characters, worried about his fate, and finally moved to the last page. Very very nice first novel!

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