A Man With No Title by Xavier Le Clerc review – a poignant hymn to an Algerian father
In a recent interview, French Algerian novelist Xavier Le Clerc said he feels otherness in his bones. When his father died in 2020, he decided to tell his story, from his brutal upbringing in northern Algeria and harsh existence during the Algerian war to raising a family in France. His father was illiterate and rarely spoke of his experiences, so Le Clerc imagines much of his past.
The author’s starting point is Albert Camus’s 1939 series of articles about the mass poverty he witnessed in Kabylia in 1939; the starving children Camus saw fighting with dogs for scraps of food coincided with Le Clerc’s father’s childhood. Born in 1937, Mohand-Saïd Aït-Taleb grew up in a village without running water or electricity. At just nine years old he walked more than 300 miles (500km) to Oran province to join the grape harvest. At 25, he left a newly independent Algeria to work in France. He spent most of his working life in a metal factory in Normandy, where his meagre wages were never enough to provide for his wife and nine children, and he was forced to take early retirement in 1992.
As a child, he found solace in stolen library books, dreaming of the day that his books “would stand proudly on shelves”
Le Clerc, who lives in the UK, also explores his own origins, growing up as an Algerian immigrant in France, coming out to his family, the prejudice he endured and his self-imposed exile in Paris. As a child, he found solace in stolen library books, dreaming of the day that his books “would stand proudly on shelves, and be stolen in turn by some kid from a high-rise council estate”. He changed his name in 2012 and career opportunities, previously denied him, flooded in.
Translated by William Rodarmor, A Man With No Title is a powerful account of a marginalised community. As well as a poignant hymn to his father – “born dispossessed, without a title to land or French citizenship papers” – Le Clerc also pays tribute to France and the redemption it offered him through education. In finding his father, he discovers something of himself and the resilience they share.
• A Man With No Title by Xavier Le Clerc (translated by William Rodarmor) is published by Saqi Books (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
