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The Last One: A Novel (2020)

by Fatima Daas

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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914299,760 (3.73)3
"Drawn from the author's experiences growing up in a Paris banlieue, a powerful, lyric debut that explores the diverse, often conflicting facets of her identity-French, Algerian, Muslim, lesbian. The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo, and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transportation to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy-her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn't know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing. This extraordinary first novel, anchored and buoyed by the refrain "My name is Fatima," is a vital portrait of a young woman finding herself in a modern world full of contradictions. Daas's journey to living her sexuality in spite of expectations about who she should be offers a powerful perspective on the queer experience"--… (more)
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» See also 3 mentions

English (1)  Spanish (1)  German (1)  French (1)  All languages (4)
A lightning fast read, this is an impressionistic piece of autofiction by a young Frenchwoman from an Algerian family background struggling to reconcile her identities as a Muslim and a lesbian. A series of short scenes in no chronological order from childhood to young adulthood all beginning the same way with an invocation of identity - “I am Fatima Daas. I am a…” - give the work something of the structure of a formal prayer or recitation of a creed, and like an institutional religious creed it can seem to skip along hitting the main points of the thing without diving very deep into introspection or exegesis. Of course those can be found elsewhere in religious texts, and I hope that Fatima Daas (the author) will dive deeper in future texts herself. I don’t feel I got to know Fatima Daas (the character) all that well here, more that I gained an understanding that yes, she exists, she is a lesbian Muslim and she exists, despite the attempted erasure of that identity by her family, by her religion, and perhaps by her secular lovers as well. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Fatima Daasprimary authorall editionscalculated
Malafosse, Sina deTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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"Drawn from the author's experiences growing up in a Paris banlieue, a powerful, lyric debut that explores the diverse, often conflicting facets of her identity-French, Algerian, Muslim, lesbian. The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo, and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends more than three hours a day on public transportation to and from the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian manners. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy-her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family and comes into her own, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn't know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing. This extraordinary first novel, anchored and buoyed by the refrain "My name is Fatima," is a vital portrait of a young woman finding herself in a modern world full of contradictions. Daas's journey to living her sexuality in spite of expectations about who she should be offers a powerful perspective on the queer experience"--

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