The Brooklyn Rail

Fathers and sons part ways across a distance that binds them. If the son is a writer, the father’s world turns into a word. A Man With No Title, a 2022 work of nonfiction by Xavier Le Clerc, out now from Saqi Books in an English translation by William Rodarmor, offers a narrative portrait of the author’s father, who immigrated from Algeria to France, worked in the steel mills, and raised a family; it’s also an account of the author’s growth into maturity and development as an artist.

A Man With No Title opens in the Kabylian village of Bouhamza, the ancestral home of the author’s family, “far from everything, even the twentieth century,” as a little boy watches the unknown pied-noir journalist Albert Camus arrive in town to report on the conditions of its inhabitants. The author imagines this child, one of many depicted with dignity and compassion in a series of articles Camus later collected in his Algerian Chronicles, was Mohand-Saïd Aït-Taleb, his father. This conceit sets the stage for a depiction of Aït-Taleb’s early life, based on documentary records and second-hand accounts.

The portrayal relies on supposition, even after the author enters the story and the focus shifts from the father to the son. Reaching the end of his reconstruction of Aït-Taleb’s life, the young Xavier takes refuge “on the margins” in the Caen library, where he seeks Aït-Taleb in photos of “ragged fellahs with sickles in hand and wide, battered straw hats covering their sunbaked heads.” He also finds his father in Cripure, the protagonist of Louis Guilloux’s novel Blood Dark, because “the same despair, the same dark blood flowed in his veins.” Apprehending at once his path as a writer and his identity as a young man, the teenager finds a model in the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf—an Arab and naturalized Frenchman, like him—because “Maalouf represented the authority, serenity and erudition of a father I hadn’t been lucky enough to have.” Identifying himself with Maalouf, the young Le Clerc imitates Franz Kafka’s Letter to his Father, “but I found it impossible to articulate what I wanted to tell my own father.” The books Le Clerc reads during this period “would eventually make me a stranger within my own family,” with drastic consequences.

A little boy who grows up to be a young man as “polite and sensitive” as if he’d been born “a cosseted ambassador’s son surrounded by gilded mirrors,” Le Clerc loves the “light-hearted atmosphere” of “gossiping, laughing women.” A growing consciousness of his queerness corresponds with his period of refuge in the library, where he reads Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child, “the story of Ahmed, who was born a girl, but whose father disguised her as a boy.” The young gay man can’t pass as straight, and doesn’t try to—“word of my ‘deviance’ got around and started a nightmare whose danger I refused to see.” When a local man threatens him, he leaves town, traveling to Paris and London.

A Man With No Title concludes with a reconciliation, whose rejection of bitterness seems less elective than temperamental: “Even if I had been missing my father for more than twenty years, even if nobody deserves a life as painful as his,” Le Clerc writes, “what good does it do to be haunted by it, like Hamlet?” In a reprise of the concluding pages of his 2021 novel Cent vingt francs, in which he writes a letter to his great-grandfather Saïd, Le Clerc closes A Man With No Title with a letter to Mohand:

The rage you passed down to me was a spur, driving me to write honestly. If I misunderstood you, it wasn’t because of your outbursts, but your silence. If I am being honest, that felt less painful than recognizing what we’ve had in common all these years, namely a profound solitude.

To have a father, and to acknowledge him, but to know him barely at all, and seldom speak with him, is not nothing, but it asks more than it divulges. The open-heartedness of A Man With No Title is one of its distinctive characteristics. Describing its author’s development, A Man With No Title smuggles some elements of the Künstlerroman into the territory of memoir, both of which in any case are methods of placing an individual in a historical context.

Within the tradition of French memoir, works tend to be either intimate and private, or outward and public. This text is the former—like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Gérard de Nerval, say, rather than Stendhal and François-René de Chateaubriand. Among recent autobiographical works in French, one thinks of A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, which Le Clerc mentions in A Man With No Title, and Constance Debré’s Name, but in several important ways this book is closest to Zahia Rahmani’s autobiographical works France, Story of a Childhood and Moze. Yet the book’s achievement at the level of form, where subject matter shades over into style, distinguishes it from others of its kind. A Man With No Title conducts a kind of negotiation between its author and literature. Le Clerc stations himself, lays claim to his themes. His distinctive technique for doing this is to rusticate his metaphors, and bring them down to earth, restoring his figures of speech to the concrete reality that dwells near their origins but lies dormant within their common everyday usage. In these lines—“There is no discount on a trip into the past”; “My illiterate father was my first book”; “The few stories he told were rare escapees”; “But his reminiscences weren’t Proustian madeleines, they were the shrapnel of poverty”; “Violence was the only country we knew”; “The only gold my father ever saw was in the fiery sky at midnight”; “The only documents you ever had were bus tickets and residency permits”—Le Clerc makes literature his own and adds his signature to the list of French prose stylists.

Contemporary written English lacks a subjunctive, seldom uses the conditional, and ill expresses what might be called “the elaborate presence of the unknown.” The subject-verb-object structure of English dominates feeling and thought. Any voice that strays from the terse denotation of pulp novels, news sites, and business emails (so-called “plain” English) comes off as eccentric. The language of A Man With No Title tells another story, and portrays another life, that of an author who dwells in the conditional tense, the subjunctive mood. It’s the sort of life that makes you ask “what if” and answer “probably,” “maybe,” “might,” “would,” “unless.” Describing the day Algeria gained its independence from France, the day his grandmother died, Le Clerc comments on the conflict between private grief and public celebration with a single characteristically laconic sentence. Here is the line in Le Clerc’s original French, indicating how his family felt that day: “Je doute qu’ils aient alors partagé l’euphorie de toutes les wilayas qui s’était déplacées en masse à Alger, à pied ou dans des camions surchargés.” And here is the same sentence, in William Rodarmor’s American English: “I doubt they shared the wilayas’ euphoria as people headed en masse to Algiers on foot or in overloaded trucks.” (“Wilaya” is an Arabic word meaning province.)

To this reader, there is a certain amount of timbre, or color, in the phrase “qu’ils aient alors partagé” that is not present, or not available, in “they shared.” The long open vocable of the subjunctive auxiliary verb “aient” lengthens the utterance, and draws out its uncertainty, while the interjection “alors” introduces a note of hesitation, and/or logical consequence, that causes the participle “partagé” to escape the lips (the mental mouth, so to speak, the silent reader’s enunciatory imagination) like a fact the speaker attempts to suppress, but can’t. In contrast, the translation takes on a breathless headlong haste that zaps its freight of meaning straight to the reader’s brain without delay, an urgent dispatch from the moment itself, rather than a distant reflection upon that moment. In this sense translator William Rodarmor’s English comports well with the American voice of Francophone literature, according to whose conventions a line of text tends to unroll, like a scroll or highway, and not to twist and fold back upon itself, like smoke or a snake. In this way, a French autobiographical text about sons and fathers is legible in English from within a different tradition that has its own accounts of sons and fathers, for example Gregory Pardlo’s Air Traffic, Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Phillip Lopate’s “The Story of my Father,” and J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself.

At best, the dazzling logic of English obscures its clear color—think of Bertrand Russell’s Euclidean transparency, not John Keats’s Shakespearean excess—and at worst, “a grammar of deprivation” (as Le Clerc calls it, saying that his father “would slip into a mineral language” and become enraged) stays stuck in the pre-articulate. Not only do translators have a chance to go against the current state of English when they bring books into this language, they can also combat the social conditions of which English, in its bland ubiquity as a lingua franca, is a part. Rodarmor’s formidable body of work includes the recent noteworthy The State of Israel vs. the Jews by Sylvain Cypel, a journalistic exposé of ideology; and the crime novel Article 353 by Tanguy Viel. As with those titles, Rodarmor has created an English idiom for A Man With No Title that adds to our store of liberation.