Small Country
Gaël Faye, Sarah Ardizzone (translation)
French-Rwandan rap star Gaël Faye’s debut novel shares the title (and narrative) of one of his most famous songs “Petit Pays” (“Small Country”) & is informed by his own complicated biography. Faye, like his protagonist Gabriel, is the son of a French father & Rwandan mother, & left Burundi for France after the outbreak of the civil war & the Rwandan genocide.
Small Country opens with a young disillusioned Gabriel in Paris, going on countless first dates with beautiful girls who always ask: “So, where are you from?” When he informs them with cold cynicism, that his identity can be weighed in corpses, they don’t react—they’d rather keep things light than dwell on the violence that shaped his childhood. And so, not even the lanky & languid girls can hold his interest for long. Increasingly haunted by his homeland, he realizes that until he acknowledges the past he’ll never be free enough to imagine his future.
Categories:
Year:
2018
Publisher:
Hogarth, Penguin Random House
Language:
english
Pages:
177
ISBN 10:
1524759899
ISBN 13:
9781524759896
File:
EPUB, 944 KB
IPFS:
,
english, 2018