“At the moment I sit down to write,” she admits, “someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me. Or an Algerian fighting in the F.L.N.” Her plight is more than just a form of white liberal guilt or piety. In the yellow, we find fragments of a novel based on her love life; in the blue, a record of daily events. (How different this is from our current generation of nationalists, whose desperation for roots drives them back to imagined Edens.) At the end of the novel she abandons all divisions and sweeps everything into a single “golden notebook.”

Source: New York Times August 15, 2020 09:00 UTC