Nina Bouraoui

Mid-80s, subversive androgynous pop everywhere, AIDS scare, Marie finds herself sixteen years old in Zürich, well-off child of well-off parents with well-off friends, hormones surging all over the place, parents barely present if they're even in the same country. Parties, make-outs, music, VHS, alcohol, ski trips, discos, make-outs, alcohol...

Should be fun. The happy life of the title.

Except her young aunt is dying of cancer (hence her mother's absence), which is horrible, and while show more everyone else is pairing up Marie is helplessly in love with Diane, which is wonderful, but impossible. Diane, who the boys all say "oozes sex", who is happy to play with the idea and lead Marie on, but is either too straight or too chickenshit to not keep running back to her boyfriend, and can't understand why it's such a big deal for Marie who has everything to lose.

Man, how Bouraoui writes; obsessively sketches every conflicting emotion of grief and love and infatuation and desire and fear and hatred in a hailstorm of minute brushstrokes, short chapters, her narrator yanked back and forth in the storms of adolescence, love and self-discovery. And somehow, despite all the heartache, it still earns the title without necessarily going for the obvious happy ending. show less

I've always felt illegal at passport checkpoints. Without correct papers. Always expect to be ejected from the line of passengers, surrounded and seized by two police officers, then taken to a small room. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going?

Apparently largely autobiographical, Tomboy is the story of Yasmina/Nina/Jasmine, born to an Algerian father and a French mother only a few years after the very bloody liberation war, growing up in Algiers with a boy for a best friend, show more which works fine as long as they're children. But then she reaches puberty and gradually becomes aware of what she is by what she is not; female, mixed-race, tomboyish, gay, too foreign in both of her home countries, she faces a low-key but constant barrage of everything from open racist hostility to well-meaning can-I-pet-the-dog curiosity from all those who recognise her as Something Different, while the climate hardens in both Algeria and France. Yada yada yada, important, yeah, but we've heard that before. What makes it fresh is the way she tells it, both in the detail, all the tiny little impressions that make up everyday life, and in that prose, all short sentences bouncing off and contrasting and contradicting and expanding on each other. Reading Bouraoui is like putting together a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, where you find yourself admiring both the individual pieces and the finished product, but it's the act of watching it all come together to form a whole that stays with you. show less

Young Yasmina - known as Nina, Brio, or even Ahmed - grows up in Algeria and moves to Rennes, France, the place of her birth, exploring her ethnic and gender identity.

Though only 115 pages, this "auto-fiction" story leaves a lot to digest in its dense prose of Nina's internal monologue. She frames the narrative with her friendship with Amine, a boy about her age, who also has an Algerian father and French mother, and the ways in which the history of those countries and their war affect them show more and make them neither one nor the other, always an outsider wherever they go. The narrative shifts again when she goes to Rennes and lives with her grandparents, experiencing the racism and judgment of people who can't pronounce her full name. In some ways in reminded me of Annie Ernaux's introspective look at the past, but in Tomboy there is less of a plot and more of a series of impressions. It was challenging but evocative reading. show less

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bSPNboKCzM

A love story set between two terrorist attacks that seem almost personal - or technically, it's a story about two loves, both of which end, one of them after a long time, about five people in two different triangles... but it's one love story, a trauma of heartbreak forcing the narrator to look at everything that makes her her. At times melodramatic (but never cheaply so), at others completely physical ... Bouraoui seems incapable of not getting show more under my skin.

I don't know if happiness is one, indivisible, large, extensive and unique, or if consists of poetic shards - the smell of grass after rain, the first day of summer, a field of poppies, a late autumn sky, a blue luminous glacier, the certainty of being part of a whole that gets on with one and the same power, loves with one and the same love. I don't know if you can measure, decide the amount of happiness. If you can grip it like an object, hold it tightly, stop it from falling. show less