Re-Covered: The Mischief
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
Let’s play “guess the novel”: It was written and first published in French in the mid-50’s, and is set over the course of a single summer. Its heroine is one of the jeunesse dorée, dissatisfied and bored despite her wealth and privilege. She drives a fast sports car, and idles away her days sunbathing on Mediterranean beaches and flirting with her boyfriend. She’s a capricious enfant terrible, and she’s stricken with jealousy at the happiness of a couple close to her, so she amuses herself by sabotaging their relationship, with unexpectedly tragic consequences.
Surprisingly, I’m not talking about Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, but a lesser-known work by the Algerian writer Assia Djebar. La Soif was first published in France in 1957 (three years after Bonjour Tristesse) and nimbly translated into English by Frances Frenaye, as The Mischief, the following year. There are plenty of parallels between the two novels. Both were debuts written by precociously young women writers—Sagan was eighteen and Djebar twenty-one—a description that also applied to their heroines: Sagan’s seventeen-year-old Cécile and Djebar’s twenty-year-old Nadia. However, while Bonjour Tristesse remains famous, recognized today as a mid-twentieth-century literary sensation-turned-French-classic, The Mischief is barely remembered, out of print in both the original French and the English translation.
This isn’t to say, for example, was the first novel written by an Algerian woman to be published outside of Algeria. Not that this impressive detail saved the book from being considered rather lightweight by contemporary critics. The comparisons to were not particularly helpful. Sagan’s novel, although notorious, had garnered mixed reviews, some of which were extremely damning; a “vulgar, sad little book,” wrote . Although critics don’t appear to have been as harsh about Djebar’s novel, despite its “nicely plotted” and “skillfully executed” turns—as the reviewer in the described them— was reduced to somewhat trivial juvenilia. This opinion only solidified as Djebar’s voice became more overtly political throughout the course of her career. Many of her later novels remain in print—from (, 1962), which documents the lives of women in a rural Algerian town who are drawn to the resistance movement through her impressive tetralogy about the history of Algiers that emphasizes the horrors of the country’s colonial past, its struggle for liberation, and the subordinate position of women in Maghreb society, which began with (, 1985) and ends with (, 1995). But with its ostensibly more frivolous storyline, has fallen by the wayside.
