This Tilting World by Colette Fellous, Trans: Sophie Lewis, (Les Fugitives, £13)
On 26th June 2015, 30 British tourists and eight local people were machine-gunned down at a resort just north of Sousse, Tunisia. The gunman was a member of Ilis, a Levantine group affiliated to Isis, and the police response was woefully slow, exacerbating the death toll.
This was the springboard for this extraordinary work of personal memoir and philosophical meditation.
The subject lies in its English title, in reference to a world that has lost its bearings, any sense of common humanity, pulled to extremes, tipping on its axis.
The question is posed: “This tilting world, how can we talk about it, how make sense of it? Only by naming the appalling blow these deaths have dealt each one of us… and this terror that is taking root everywhere, even within our own bodies.”
The French title is Pièces Détachées, a mosaic of loss and death, including antisemitic and pro-Islamist assassinations in Paris, Fellous’s Parisian home city.
Loss personalises with that of her beloved father and when a dear friend and fellow writer dies sailing the ocean. Both men suffer heart attacks, and their “great hearts” are what Fellous cares for.
She composes a eulogy for her father, returning to him that parental love he taught her.
“Me attempting, in piecemeal fashion, to tell the story of a father born and dead in the 20th century, and the story of this world now, this Tunisian village I shall have to leave behind, in 2015”. The child becomes parent to the adult Fellous.
Fellous, a Tunisian Jew of Spanish and Sicilian origins whose first languages are Arabic and Italian, has published more than 20 novels in French, winning the Prix Marguerite Duras for Aujourd’hui. This is her first work to be translated into English, Sophie Lewis emulating the meticulous attention to shifts in register and vocabulary in the original.
While Fellous’s style honours the associative memory lines of Proust or the revealing descriptive detail of Maupassant, her thinking is with Roland Barthes — as is the inclusion of photographs, associating the visual with the textual — whose voice she describes as “calm, firm, sensible, lucid”.
It seems fitting to conclude this review with the words of Barthes, her acknowledged master, written for his final column for the Nouvel Observateur, titled Pause:
“We do have to fight for softness, from the moment it’s deliberate, doesn’t softness become a force? My writing small is a moral choice”.
There is little higher praise than to say that this short book — in which a mass murder is described in terms of the reaction of a flower-seller — is a perfect example of that choice exquisitely realised.
Amanda Hopkinson is a writer, lecturer and translator
