Originally published in 1955, The Pillar of Salt the semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy growing up in French colonized Tunisia. To gain access to privileged French society, he must reject his many identities - Jew, Arab, and African. But, on the eve of World War II, he is forced to come to terms with his loyalties and his past
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Originally published in 1955, The Pillar of Salt the semi-autobiographical novel about a young boy growing up in French colonized Tunisia. To gain access to privileged French society, he must reject his many identities - Jew, Arab, and African. But, on the eve of World War II, he is forced to come to terms with his loyalties and his past
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Albert Memmi's 1955 novel, "The Pillar of Salt" is set in French Tunisia in the between the two World Wars and through WW II. The book is told in the first person by a highly introverted, self-centered young man, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, and tells the story of his life through early manhood. The novel is much in the character of French existentialism.
The narrator is a Tunisian Jew and the child of a poor family that lives in an alley ghetto. His father is Italian and a craftsman who works with leather while his mother is illiterate and a Berber. The narrator is raised in an observant Jewish home and after a rudimentary early education is accepted into a high school through a sponsor who pays all his expenses. Young Benillouche graduates at the top of his class with the ambition of continuing his education and becoming a philosopher. His dreams are interrupted by WW II.
The story is told in a highly personal, almost atomized voice, and its theme is the narrator's search for personal identity. Benillouche sees himself as a combination of Jewish, Arabic, and African. As he studies in school, he comes to want to see himself is a European, as a French intellectual. He is not accepted by his peers due to his poverty, national origin, religion, and mannerisms. Benillouche comes to understand through these experiences and through subsequent experiences in the War that he cannot be accepted as a European, either by others or by himself. He continues to reject the earlier parts of his identity. With the end of the war, Benillouche appears isolated and at a loss as how to lead his life.
The novel offers a mostly convincing portrayal of the young narrator and of how he forms his outlook on life. It includes many well-drawn scenes, including the pictures of the alley in which the narrator grows up, his growing love for philosophy, his sexual initiation in a brothel, and more.
It also offers a picture of Jewish life in French Tunisia, a place I knew little about. I could understand the young man's dreams of philosophy and the way there were dashed. With all the echoes of French existentialism, the book reminded me most of Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man." in the protagonist's ultimate feeling of loss and isolation.
The novel illustrates a mood as well as telling a particular coming of age story. It might encourage other ways of thinking of questions of personal identity than the ways largely forced on the young narrator by himself and by those around him. Individuals might be viewed as having many identities, not a single essence, and different identities are shared with different people. That is not the tenor of this book or the young narrator. This approach might not be suggested by his own experience.
Memmi revisited this novel late in his life. In a brief Introduction written in 2013, he described the book as "a young man's account of a difficult journey at the dawn of his life among the fears and humiliations of his family, the suspicious ambiguity of Muslims and the contempt of Western colonizers and a document about a community that has now all but disappeared." Albert Camus wrote a Preface to the original French edition of "Pillar of Salt". He praised the book and the author's depiction of the struggles of its young protagonist. Camus wrote perceptively: "All of us, French and born in North Africa, also remain who we are, faced with contradictions that today bloody our cities, and which we will not overcome by fleeing them, but by living them out." Camus' recognition that difficulties and contradictions are not to be overcome by flight but by "living them out" beautifully summarizes the response I had to Memmi's fine novel.
