A novelist’s reimagining of his late parent’s life is a potent memoir of marginalisation

In a recent interview, French Algerian novelist Xavier Le Clerc said he feels otherness in his bones. When his father died in 2020, he decided to tell his story, from his brutal upbringing in northern Algeria and harsh existence during the Algerian war to raising a family in France. His father was illiterate and rarely spoke of his experiences, so Le Clerc imagines much of his past.

The author’s starting point is Albert Camus’s 1939 series of articles about the mass poverty he witnessed in Kabylia in 1939; the starving children Camus saw fighting with dogs for scraps of food coincided with Le Clerc’s father’s childhood. Born in 1937, Mohand-Saïd Aït-Taleb grew up in a village without running water or electricity. At just nine years old he walked more than 300 miles (500km) to Oran province to join the grape harvest. At 25, he left a newly independent Algeria to work in France. He spent most of his working life in a metal factory in Normandy, where his meagre wages were never enough to provide for his wife and nine children, and he was forced to take early retirement in 1992.