One-Way - Softcover

Didier Van Cauwelaert; Mark Polizzotti

3.33

1,453 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590512006 ISBN 13: 9781590512005

Publisher: Other Press, 2005

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Winner of the 1994 Prix Goncourt, shosen as one of the Best Books of 2003 by The Seattle Times.

One-Way recounts the comic, absurd, and all-too-believable adventures of Aziz Kemal, a young Frenchman raised as an Arab by Marseille gypsies. Arrested for a crime he did not commit, Aziz becomes the target of a government campaign to repatriate illegal immigrants and finds himself en route to Morocco, despite the fact that he is not Moroccan. Accompanying Aziz is a touchingly na�ve and neurotic "humanitarian attach�" named Jean-Pierre Schneider, who drowns his own personal woes in his zeal to build a new life for his charge in a land neither one has ever seen.

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About the Author:

Didier van Cauwelaert is the author of several international bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Out of My Head (Other Press, 2004). He also wrote the libretto for the off-Broadway musical, Amour, which garnered five Tony nominations in 2003. Mark Polizzotti has translated numerous books from the French, including works by Andr� Breton, Jean Echenoz, Marguerite Duras, and Gustave Flaubert. He is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andr� Breton, a collection of poems, The New Life, and the collaborative novel S. He lives in Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

Van Cauwelaert's tale of an orphan's quest for cultural identity won the Prix Goncourt when it was published in 1994, the year after France passed laws restricting immigration and the rights of current immigrants. Aziz Kemal is an immigrant himself, at least according to the false Moroccan papers he carries. In fact, he is French and an "accidental foundling." Raised, reluctantly, by the Gypsies who rescued him from the car crash that killed his parents, Aziz narrates his story with the breezy, elegant detachment of a double outsider in Marseilles. At times, the book feels more like a dramatic monologue than a novel, as Aziz steals car radios for a living, plays soccer and enjoys trysts with someone else's girl. But it also challenges ethnic and national identity in France: what is identity, the novel asks, other than a story we tell? When the immigration laws take effect, Aziz is deported to his supposed homeland of Morocco, a place he's only read about. Paired with Jean-Pierre Schneider, an immigration official assigned to accompany him, Aziz spins tales of an imaginary Moroccan past for Jean Pierre's files. Jean-Pierre is Aziz's perfect foil: he remembers all too well his own hard youth. In Morocco, the novel blooms deliciously into a buddy flick, a road trip, a love triangle and a metafictional comment on the reliability of narrators. When Aziz's narration is interrupted by an excerpt from Jean-Pierre's journal, the book is at its heartbreaking, hilarious best, perhaps because Van Cauwelaert is freed from his uneducated hero and allowed full use of high-minded absurdity, which he both revels in and pokes fun at.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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