Nostalgia and Fear,
Fueling French Literature
Well before tensions between France’s Muslim and non-Muslim populations rose in response to the terrorist attacks last month, the Islamic world had been looming large in French literature this season — a sign of the powerful influence the Middle East and North Africa play in the nation’s cultural imagination.
Three of the four novels shortlisted in October for France’s most prestigious book award, the Goncourt Prize, concern the Arab world. A fifth novel, “2084,” a dystopian tale set in a totalitarian Islamic caliphate by the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, is a best seller. The books have also won an array of other awards.
These novels have captivated a country grappling with its identity and its vexed history as a colonial power, and show how France is pulled today between nostalgia for its past and fear for its future.
“French literature is very political this year, very open to the world, after being closed in on itself,” said Éric Naulleau, a cultural commentator and a book critic for Le Point, a Paris weekly. “It’s the result of the period of tension that we’re living in.”