In the Country of Others
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Description
The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end, one species dominates another. One day, the orange will win out over the lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat.
In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the world stage and won her acclaim for her "devastatingly perceptive character studies" (The New York Times Book Review), Leila Slimani draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment.
Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmer's wife to defying the country's chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population.
As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife's resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others--especially the women, forced to live in the land of men--and with this novel, Leila Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.
Book Information
Posts
This is one of those books you read and it leaves you hanging and unable to really rate it. It wasn’t bad, it was actually quite an interesting read and very gory. Amine is a bastard and generally all the men were portrayed as abusers and bastards. They had no care for the women most of the time and if they did, it was to appease their own conscience. Mathilde is not to be spared either, she was harsh to Aïcha and Selma mainly and it was disturbing to see a mother and woman not defend her own. It was sad to read but at the same time i also see her own fragility and depression that she had to contend with the entire time. Being in Morocco in Amine’s turf gave him “power” to treat Mathilde ruthlessly as she had no place to run. The society encourages women abuse and cared not for their education. I understand it was a time in history when the country was fighting for its independence but it was a brutal society. Of course now women have better opportunities but it feels like sometimes being from a certain religious background predisposes women to violence and unkindness.
Description
The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end, one species dominates another. One day, the orange will win out over the lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat.
In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the world stage and won her acclaim for her "devastatingly perceptive character studies" (The New York Times Book Review), Leila Slimani draws on her own family's inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women's empowerment.
Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde goes from being reduced to a farmer's wife to defying the country's chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population.
As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife's resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others--especially the women, forced to live in the land of men--and with this novel, Leila Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.
Book Information
Posts
This is one of those books you read and it leaves you hanging and unable to really rate it. It wasn’t bad, it was actually quite an interesting read and very gory. Amine is a bastard and generally all the men were portrayed as abusers and bastards. They had no care for the women most of the time and if they did, it was to appease their own conscience. Mathilde is not to be spared either, she was harsh to Aïcha and Selma mainly and it was disturbing to see a mother and woman not defend her own. It was sad to read but at the same time i also see her own fragility and depression that she had to contend with the entire time. Being in Morocco in Amine’s turf gave him “power” to treat Mathilde ruthlessly as she had no place to run. The society encourages women abuse and cared not for their education. I understand it was a time in history when the country was fighting for its independence but it was a brutal society. Of course now women have better opportunities but it feels like sometimes being from a certain religious background predisposes women to violence and unkindness.