Double nationalité
A young woman wakes up at the airport in Paris, and realises she has total amnesia - she doesn’t know if she’s arriving to or is leaving Paris, where she lives, who she is, what her profession is. Slowly, piece by piece, she investigates her own life based on the clues she has access to (her handbag, her documents) and makes her way to her Parisian apartment.
Once inside the apartment, she tries to piece together her correspondences and from the objects she possesses. She learns about her past upbringing in France as a child of Eastern European immigrants and starts a long process of getting to know her own life.
She learns that she works as a translator-interpreter, mastering two languages, French and “Yazige”. She specializes in legal texts, eventually one of her work assignments leads her to interpret for a prostitute whom the police wants to question as part of a raid while working on busting a network for of human trafficking. She later travels to “Yazigie”, located somewhere in Eastern Europe, where she continues her journey of finding her identity.
Throughout her inner journey, the narrator delves into a multitude of topics, including social and philosophical issues such as language, bilingualism, diglossia, nationality and citizenship, identity, immigration, nationalism, racism, class hierarchy, colonisation, exploitation, cruelty in the animal agriculture industry, and more.
I really enjoyed reading this book. It was like reading someone’s inner thoughts phrased in an eloquent and socially sensitive manner.
