Mémoire d’absence

Letters, like a cry for help, like throwing a bottle into the sea, a happiness that has fled, a lost country and the refusal to know the truth. The refuge in silence and pain is heard even more.

Alongside this pain, a stranger, a witness who says what he sees, what he believes he understands.

Letters and narrative respond to each other throughout the book and draw the image of an exceptional love lived in a small port on the Algerian coast. A country never named but always present like, in a tapestry, the essential weft.

Also always present, the cruel sea, so familiar.

Jeanine de la Hogue, co-founder of the association Memoire d Afrique du Nord, directs the review Memoire plurielle.

Born in Algeria, she arrived in France in 1962 and has been a journalist, publisher, and writer. A specialist in French literature in North Africa, she writes several book columns.