Suzanne Ruta

This is tragic love story of Lucy, a bright young New Yorker in France on a Fulbright Scholarship, and Wally, an Algerian mechanic. Their relationship is doomed from the outset, but not because Lucy is 20 and Wally is 35, or because of the immense cultural divide between them, or the difference in social class. It's doomed because Wally is already married. His wife and three children live in Algeria and Wally sends home the bulk of his salary every month to support them. Wally is an auto-didact, and the curious bits of knowledge he teaches Lucy fill the novel - explanations of how to speak in French slang, details of life in revolutionary Algeria, scattered bits of Arab history. Amidst this profusion of information, the story itself is very simple - Lucy and Wally have a passionate affair in an idyllic French Alpine town, but eventually Wally's family tells him that it's time to return home and take his position as head of the household. Wally returns to Algeria.

Before Wally leaves, Lucy becomes pregnant. She had aborted a child of his earlier, but now that Wally is gone she decides to keep the baby - it's a way for her to hold on to him, to refuse to admit that their relationship is over. When the child is born, she gives it to Wally to raise with his family - she imagines it will be happy and loved by its father. Lucy returns to her family, continues her life, marries another man, and tells nobody about her first child or its father. Forty years later, after 9/11 and the collapse of the twin towers, Lucy has has no news of her son and she is desperate for news. She determines to track the child down.

The book is ostensibly narrated in 2001 by a French-Algerian poet visiting New York on an author's tour. Through a series of coincidences, he meets Lucy and sits down to have a coffee with her. She wants to tell him her story, and he offers to listen. At that point, Lucy's voice takes over and the story shifts to France in the early 1960s. When their conversation is done, the poet returns to France and the story continues in letters that Lucy writes to the poet. She describes her search for her son and also reveals what happened after she gave up her baby and left France.

Finally, the narrator intrudes again. He has just given a reading of his poems when a young Algerian woman shows him a picture of Lucy's American family, which he immediately recognizes. The poet has a conversation with the young woman, who is one of Wally's legitimate children. Lucy's son with Wally, Karim, is her half brother. The poet learns what Lucy has spent so much time trying to find out: Karim is dead, shot by a sniper, one of the casualties of Algeria's endless civil war. Although it is sad news, he writes to Lucy to tell her what he has learned and convince her to give up her search.

The last image in the book is a poignant one. The poet's chauffeur in New York writes him a letter about meeting Lucy by chance, and we see her confused, losing her memory as she ages, "looking for somebody to mother." She is permanently unfulfilled and grief-stricken. TO ALGERIA, WITH LOVE is full of curious bits of knowledge and offers a very learned explanation of Algeria's civil war. But I thought the writing lacked that magical something that could pull this sprawling book together and make it whole, connecting the many places and times where it takes place. It's also relentlessly gloomy. It combines a tragic love story, the tragic modern history of Algeria, the frustrations and humiliations of sexually active women in the days before birth control was widely available, with details of Lucy's dysfunctional American family and frequently cruel relatives. This book almost, but doesn't quite, get a recommendation from me - it falls a little short, although there is much to praise.… (más)