IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS

Morocco’s decolonization provides the backdrop for this interracial family drama.

Tall, fair-skinned Mathilde anticipates a life of adventure and exoticism when, in 1945, she marries Amine Belhaj, a stocky, dark-skinned Moroccan whose French army regiment is stationed in her Alsatian village. Instead, upon returning to Amine’s home city of Meknes, the newlyweds move in with Amine’s mother while struggling to evict a tenant from the land Amine inherited from his father. When, years later, the couple finally regains control of the remote property and relocates, an increasingly dour Amine works day and night to try to farm the stony acreage, leaving a lonely Mathilde to raise their daughter, Aïcha, and son, Selim. As clashes between the country’s pro-independence nationalists and French colonists grow violent, each of the characters suffers feelings of otherness. Amine sympathizes with his compatriots, though he’s not militant, and he secretly holds the French in esteem. Mathilde craves acceptance but chafes against her new home’s views regarding the subjugation of women. And while biracial Aïcha’s frizzy hair and secondhand clothes make her an outcast at her French-run Catholic school, its religious teachings are the young girl’s greatest solace. First in a planned trilogy inspired by her family’s history, Franco-Moroccan author Slimani’s latest unfolds over the course of a decade via vignettes capturing the internal and external struggles of the Belhajs and their loved ones. The woolly narrative structure occasionally blurs the plot’s focus and saps it of drive, but Slimani’s visceral prose never fails to reel readers back in.

An affecting tale of evolution and revolution.