The art of losing

French novelist Zeniter (Take This Man, 2011) examines in expansive detail the lives of members of an Algerian family forced to leave their home in the mountains in 1962, when the French were expelled at the end of the Algerian War of Independence. Ali, who collaborated with the French, fears for his life, with good reason. He and his family immigrate to France, where they live in a resettlement camp and eventually a housing project, and are scorned both by the French and by other Algerians. In the present, Ali's granddaughter Naïma works at a Paris art gallery, and knows little about her heritage. When the gallery owner sends her to Algeria to seek out the works of an artist he wants to exhibit, Naïma meets up with the members of the family left behind and learns about her own history. While the level of detail can sometimes leave readers struggling to keep track of the many twigs on Naïma's family tree, the novel vividly portrays the fates of a group of victims and survivors of a morally complex war. This is both a classic tale of the immigrant experience and a meditation on how that experience reverberates through generations of a family.

In Zeniter's ruminative latest (after Take This Man), a French Algerian woman unearths her shrouded family history and reckons with the question of what constitutes a homeland. Ali, a veteran of the WWII French auxiliary, has built a sizable olive oil business in Algeria, but flees for France with his family after Algeria wins its independence. Ali's eldest son, Hamid, assimilates into French culture and distances himself from his family, while Naima, Hamid's art historian daughter, who endures bigotry after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other acts of terrorism, delves headlong into research on Algeria in preparation for an art exhibit by expatriate Algerian artist Lalla Fatma N'Soumer. During their interviews, she struggles to grasp the stories Lalla tells her about Algeria while piecing together an understanding of her own identity, given that Hamid had refused to take her to Algeria as a child. A trip to a museum in Tizi Ouzi provides cover for a search for information about Ali, but on the way she worries how she'll be treated as a descendent of French allies. Zeniter skillfully demonstrates the impact of colonialism on family, country, and the historical archive. With nuance and grace, this meditative novel adds to the understanding of a complex, uncomfortable era of French history. (Mar.)

Both packed and propulsive, this stunning multigenerational tale originating in the Algerian War of Independence offers a necessary history lesson (without feeling like one), important context regarding the consequences of colonialism, and concise portraiture of the personal struggle for identity. In the 1950s, when Berber villagers in Algeria's Kabylia region are caught between the French overlords and the emerging National Liberation Front, tightrope-walking efforts by leading resident Ali get him branded a traitor and force his family to flee to an unwelcoming France. Later, Ali's granddaughter Naïma--the story's catalyst--is exasperated when she's lambasted for forgetting a country she's never known, yet fearful of being lumped together with terrorists. After reluctantly traveling to Algeria on behalf of the art gallery where she works, Naïma realizes that her journey of self-discovery is just starting. Her discomfort as a woman in Algeria ("The Islamists win again," says a friend there), paired with her observation that al-Qaeda and ISIS "want dark-skinned people to find life in Europe impossible, so that they will join them," show how complicated that journey will be. VERDICT Highly recommended; from a multi-award-winning French novelist.

What if the world identifies you as being something you don't know anything about? Naïma, a young French gallery worker, spends her days drifting between alcohol-fueled despair and bliss, unable to identify the nagging uncertainty about her roots that lurks at the edge of her consciousness. Born in France, the daughter of Hamid, an Algerian immigrant, and Clarisse, the daughter of a "traditional" French family, Naïma is aware of her Algerian identity but uninformed about its meaning (to herself and to the rest of the world) primarily due to her father's purported lack of any memories about his early childhood years. After terrorist attacks in France, unspoken, but not unfelt, worries about the perception of darker skinned "Arab" residents prompt Naïma to wonder what others think of her and of her elderly Algerian grandmother. An opportunity to visit Algeria in order to prepare for an exhibit at the gallery where she works allows Naïma to explore the multigenerational effects of colonization, immigration, discrimination, and deracination--the most corrosive of these forces--on her family. Naïma's and Hamid's stories are told in turn but only after the history of Hamid's father, Ali, as well as the disturbing aftermath of the choices he and others made during the course of Algeria's war for independence. An unnamed and invisible narrator occasionally breaks through the fourth wall of Zeniter's narrative, which is densely packed with fact and feeling about Algeria's often difficult relationship with France and France's difficult relationship with Algerians. Awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (a sort of junior version of France's esteemed literary prize, voted upon by lycée students), the novel provides a crash course in a contemporary problem with historical roots. Where are you from? Zeniter's family saga addresses this question and a more difficult one: What if you don't know? Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.