I'LL TAKE THE FIRE

A decades-spanning family saga comes full circle in the final book of a trilogy that began with In the Country of Others (2021) and Watch Us Dance (2023).

Slimani picks up the saga, inspired by her Franco-Moroccan family, in 1980s Casablanca. Mehdi Daoud, the former Marxist activist who’s the new president of the Crédit Commercial du Maroc, aims to foster the emergence of a Moroccan middle class by financing social housing programs and tourism-boosting resorts. However, the more hours Mehdi puts in at the office, the less time he has for daughters Mia and Inès—a source of contention between him and his selfless wife, gynecologist Aïcha. Aïcha believes that her eldest child, Mia, wears her hair short and dresses like a boy so she can “escape the curse of girls and mothers, who always end up acting like martyrs.” In truth, Mia is secretly queer, disdains stereotypically female preoccupations, and nurtures the “unspeakable hope that she might eventually become her father’s son.” Inès, for her part, desperately wants to be like her mother—or better yet, her sensual, independent great-aunt Selma, who calls to mind “Lauren Bacall, with a cane and a cigarette holder.” Both sisters would be imprisoned for “loose morals” by their homeland’s government, so each begins plotting her personal exodus. Advance to 2021 Paris, where the tale’s modern-day frame finds novelist Mia suffering from post-Covid writer’s block. After consulting with a neurologist, Mia hops a plane to her grandparents’ farm in Fes, determined to find a way forward by reconnecting with her past. Moving back and forth in time while employing myriad narrative styles and points of view, Slimani explores issues of identity, alienation, disillusionment, and generational trauma. All Slimani’s characters shine, but her women are especially radiant, evincing a complexity and depth that elevate both this book and the series as a whole.

At once an elegy and a joyful celebration of family and home.