So Close
1. Edition December 2009
176 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
In So Close, the internationally renowned writer
Hélène Cixous recounts a return to her native Algeria
after a more than thirty-year absence. Before she can decide
to go, she must sift through large parts of her past in a land
where she never felt at home and, from a young age, knew she must
leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her
mother's rejection of the country that had rejected her
despite years of devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is
struggling with this decision, she receives a message from Zohra
Drif, with whom she has had no contact since their school days,
which was just before Zohra joined the Algerian FLN and become a
heroine in the uprising against French rule in her homeland. They
meet in Paris for the first time in more than fifty years and soon
afterward the narrator departs for Algiers.
The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations,
impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits
sites from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of
her birth, the city of the family's happiness before her
father's death when she was a young girl. The quest to find
his grave again in the overgrown Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads
to a startlingly moving scene that closes the voyage and the
book.
A Translator's Note.
prose - impressively rendered into English by one of Derrida's
principal translators, Peggy Kamuf - is hallucinatory, richly
allusive and poetic ... sly humour tugs you back into her world,
pulls you headlong towards an epiphany, into a great swell of
emotion, a rush of memories, sensations, impressions, like the
crescendo of a symphony, whose effect is all the more powerful
because it cannot be explained or described. The devastating climax
of the book is moving beyond words."
Jewish Chronicle
"This translation of a key text marks an important step forward
in making Cixous accessible to a wider public. Peggy Kamuf has
achieved the impossible, succeeding both in rendering the subtlety
of Cixous's thinking and in conveying a sense of the beauty of her
prose."
Mairéad Hanrahan, University College London
"So Close is sensationally truthful. It approaches Algeria
through the unexpected realms of writing, where literature and
reality almost touch. This fiction has a child's ability to
believe; a child who has read Proust and the Greeks, lived through
history, and can still sense the danger sleeping in a
macaroon."
Sarah Wood, University of Kent
Féminines at Paris VIII University, France
