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Nina Bouraoui. Gar;on manque Paris. Stock. 2000. 197 pages 95 F. ISBN 2-234-05275-0
NINA BOURAOUI's Garqon manque is the sixth book in an impressively prolific writing career; prolific, because her first work, La voyeuse interdite, was published only in 1991. That prizewinning novel, the fictional narrative of the psychological drama of a cloistered Algerian woman, immediately demonstrated Bouraoui's talent for expressing the raw feelings of an ecorche vif. She is just as skillful in her latest book, called neither novel nor autobiography, but which is clearly an autobiographical rendering of all facets painful, enlightening, fascinating, impossible, yet very real - of the life of a cultural, ethnic, and national hybrid.
Bouraoui is half-Algerian, through her father, and half-French, by her mother. She was born a mere five years after the end of the bloody...