Novel
A Passenger from the West
Un passager de l'Occident
Nabile Farès · 1971
Synopsis
In 1970, in Paris, an exiled Algerian writer meets James Baldwin for an interview intended for a magazine. The Black American writer confronts there the true history of Black America, and his words send the narrator back to his own. From one encounter to the next, in France and then in Spain, faces and landscapes awaken the memory of his native Algeria, of the war of independence and of what it did to his childhood, until the boundary between narrative, interview and poem is blurred.
Context
The book is born of an interview the author conducted in 1970 with James Baldwin for Jeune Afrique, and of the friendship that followed. Le Seuil published it in 1971, a year after the author's first novel, whose diffuse style and themes of lost innocence it continues, before the Découverte du nouveau monde trilogy. Peter Thompson translated it into English in 2010 for the University of New Orleans Press, together with the text of the original interview; a later edition preceded it with an introduction by Pierre Joris.
Who it is for
A novel of about one hundred and sixty pages, in French, which mixes interview, narrative and poem. It helps to know that it gains from being read with James Baldwin's thinking on exile and race in mind.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's greatest novel and the best known outside France, notably in the United States.