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January
21, 2016 Thursday 11 Shevat 5776 19:41 IST
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What happens when you lie about
who you are to circumvent being unfairly sidelined?
Karine Tuil’s astonishing fictional saga, The Age of Reinvention, makes
you understand the relentless agony of being left out in the cold simply
because of who you are.
The now 40-year-old Samir Tahar, whose life unravels before our eyes,
emigrated to France from Tunisia with his Muslim parents during the 1960s.
Samir somehow managed to leap over the enormous obstacles placed before him and
finished law school with the highest honors and an impeccable record. When he
graduated, he sent his résumé to the top 50 law firms of France and waited for
the phone to ring. Nothing happened, and he realized he needed to take the
matter into his own hands.
He removed the last two letters from his first name and became “Sam
Tahar,” and was hired soon afterwards by Pierre Levy, who was impressed with
the sharpness of the young man who stood before him.
But Levy still wanted to reassure himself that Sam was part of the
clan. So he slyly asked him if “Sam” stood for “Samuel,” and when Samir nodded,
a lifetime of deceptions and lies began that skyrocketed him to the pinnacle of
success.
He married a Jewish woman who was extremely wealthy, the daughter of
one of his top clients. He relocated to Manhattan where he headed a large
office of attorneys.
Everyone recognized his drive and ambition and provocative
intelligence.
Two beautiful children soon followed and he embraced his new Jewish
identity with the same sneaky cleverness that had allowed him to cut corners
elsewhere. He was unstoppable.
Samir was particularly adept at pushing away unpleasant thoughts.
Particularly those about his beloved mother back in France, whom he rarely
called and who knew nothing about his present life. He callously remembered his
dead father as a man who would return home from work with “his cheap shirt
stinking with yellow halos in the armpits, stinking up every room he entered
with the acrid stench of sweat – an odor he associated with poverty.”
He had to try a little harder to suppress memories of his two best
friends from law school back in the 1980s in Paris: Samuel Baron and his
gentile girlfriend Nina Roche. The three of them had been inseparable until
Samir slept with Nina while Samuel was burying his parents after they died
tragically in a car accident.
It was Samuel Baron’s Jewish identity that Samir stole and repackaged
as he climbed higher and higher among New York City’s elite. He convinced both
his wife and her parents that he was an only child – an orphan, and a Jew of
North African descent.
His wife’s parents were suspicious of his sketchy origins but wary of
hurting their daughter, who was madly in love with him. So they welcomed him
into their family and mostly kept their reservations about him to themselves.
Samir had always been able to seduce others; there was something about
him that was spellbinding. Nina Roche had remained with Samuel Baron after
Samir fled but had thought about him for decades after their brief liaison. So
had Samuel Baron, who was now a frustrated writer, and a man who seemed to
equate his own suffering with some kind of moral purity.
Tuil deliciously describes for us Samuel and Nina’s initial attraction
to Samir, explaining, “How could you not be won over by this slightly mocking
student who could tell you about his childhood in the poorest part of London or
in a dilapidated ghetto, then his adolescence in a tiny attic room and his
return to a seedy public housing project, with a flair for the sordid details
that could move you to tears and, five minutes later, talk about a meeting
between [Soviet Union leader Mikhail] Gorbachev and [French president François]
Mitterrand as if he had been there.”
Tuil describes her fully fleshed-out characters with an explosive and
original narrative style. Her sentences are often triple loaded with
adjectives, sometimes listed in a row with slashes placed between them. The
result is the creation of a building tension that allows us to feel their inner
chaos. In addition, she often places seemingly obscure footnotes on the bottom
of a page that refer to an incidental character in the book and describes them
briefly for us. These descriptions are usually depressing tales of lives
interrupted by tragic events that have thrown somebody completely off course.
They mirror the life of her central character, Samir, whose own life is
spinning dangerously out of control.
Samir is the breakthrough character here; we find ourselves wrapped up
in the tangled intricacies of his reinvention.
We are rooting for him even as we witness his many deceptions. We are
forced to ask ourselves if we would be tempted to do what he did in order to
get what he wanted. We understand his frustration and a certain righteousness
in his protests that the world is a cruel and deeply unfair place.
We watch him inflated by power and money and fame, but we see his
unhappiness too. His past is catching up with him. He worries about his mother,
and still can’t put Nina out of his mind. He feels strangled by a lack of
freedom he has trouble defining. There are voids that luxury and comfort can’t
fill. When thinking about his wife we can hear his confusion.
He admires her accomplishments and graceful self-control, but beneath
his lavish praise, we sense his elementary distaste for her and hear echoes of
anti-Semitic sentiment as well.
Tuil writes: “There was an aura about her, a halo floating over her
head. No one had ever made her feel out of place.
Up on the rostrum. In the first row. In the foreground of a photograph.
And, quite naturally, without posing or making any special effort, she was in
all of those places.”
When he reunites with Nina for a passionate affair, he feels relaxed in
a way he never does with his wife. He eats the foods his mother used to prepare
for him and listens unselfconsciously to Arabic music while they make love.
Tuil describes his intimacy with Nina as “little things, but perhaps identity
is made up of such scattered, insignificant, inexplicable fragments.”
Nina wants more from him than he can offer her, but he keeps her
hanging on, hoping for some sort of shift.
Tuil has written nine novels. This enticing one has been nominated for
the top literary awards in France and deservedly so. Tuil, the daughter of
North African Jewish parents who brought her to France at 17, remembers her
parents’ self-consciousness and their feelings of inferiority as they struggled
to assimilate in France.
She brings that acute sensitivity to Samir, an unforgettably flawed
character who reminds us what it feels like to be unfairly sidelined.
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