The TIGHTROPE WALKERS

Mohammed Aïssaoui

(Gallimard, 224 pages, 2020)

***Short-Listed for THE Prix Goncourt***

***Long-Listed for THE Prix Renaudot and THE Prix Interallié***

Kateb grew up in a roofless house with no running water and subsisted on bread soaked in olive oil. Today, at thirty-four years of age, he owns a Parisian apartment and has a rewarding career as a ghost biographer for ordinary people who want to leave a trace of their lives. Yet despite how distant his poverty-stricken childhood seems now, his first love, Nadia, still haunts him. The Nadia he remembers always helped those in need—and there were many in the housing project where they both grew up. Set on finding her again, Kateb dives into the world of French charitable associations by doing what he knows best: listening to the volunteers, and giving voice to their stories of hope and despair. Like them, he knows all too well that he himself is a tightrope walker, balancing on the thread of life.

Kateb finds every person’s existence extraordinary and worthy of being recounted. He is an expert at finding wonderful qualities as well as detecting the hidden fissures that everyone possesses. Invoking F. Scott Fitzgerald who, in The Crack-Up, talks about life as a series of breakdowns, Kateb knows that for people like himself and his illiterate immigrant mother, it is just the opposite: life is a strenuous effort to construct something that looks like a normal existence.

The thought of Nadia never leaves Kateb as he visits the associations where she might have worked. His quest is not a lonely one, as he encounters many people along the way. There are the few childhood friends with whom he still interacts, like the fabulous storyteller Bizness, whose last name is unknown to all but the police; and notable characters from his everyday life, like the “Philosopher,” who squats in a Parisian basement and offers erudite lectures on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in exchange for an espresso. As with Nadja, the character of André Breton’s iconic eponymous work, Kateb’s obsession for Nadia is fueled by her absence rather than her presence: an absence filled by the stories offered by the volunteers, like Monique, the dynamic retiree who now devotes her days working for the Restos du Cœur—a thriving multifaceted NGO that began as a simple soup kitchen. Their shared experiences illuminate the many aspects of the world of charitable associations—the unavoidable mishaps, the good intentions gone wrong, and the indelible encounters with people caught in cycles of inherited poverty.

With The Tightrope Walkers, Aïssaoui has written a work of great humanism, which speaks movingly to the art of listening, and the profound psychological wounds inflicted by poverty without ever indulging in miserabilism. With his gift for words, Kateb (“scribe” in Arabic) honors the life experiences that are entrusted to him, and in doing so reconciles himself with his own story.

Mohammed Aïssaoui is a writer and journalist at the Figaro littéraire. He is the author of L’étoile jaune et le croissant (Gallimard, 2012), Petit éloge des souvenirs (Gallimard, 2014), and L’affaire de l’esclave Furey (Gallimard, Prix Renaudot essai, 2010).