In Satisfaction, Nina Bouraoui’s third novel to be translated into English, Michele, a French woman, is living in 1970s Algiers with her Algerian husband and their prepubescent son. Against a sonic backdrop of Boney M and ELO, the Eagles and 10CC, Michele secretly and obsessively records her feelings, observations, and paranoia. Weaving her story with reflections on exile and belonging, racism, desire, cooking, and nature, Bouraoui has succeeded in writing a book in which very little seems to happen, but which leaves the reader lying flat on her back in a scented garden, in the heart of a strange city, wondering what the hell just did.

Satisfaction burrows far below the surface of Michele’s easy postcolonial existence, the world of expatriate motherhood and wifedom. The story of her son’s friendship with a girl called Bruce, paralleled with Michele’s own relationship with Bruce’s mother, Catherine, is choked with paranoia, gender confusion and ambiguity, and taboo yearnings. The ambiance is sketched deftly and with consummate credibility. From Catherine’s Parisian fashions, cigarettes, scent, and frank sexual discourse—on her lovers, her unfaithful husband and what he likes to do when he, rarely, shares her bed—Bouraoui resurrects a long-disappeared world. When Michele visits Catherine’s apartment in the Shell Building, which becomes a metaphor for the rarified way in which expatriates live, she describes Catherine’s bedroom: “Mirror, dressing table, jewellery, a stack of Playboy magazines, a blue chair with a dress thrown over it. On the bedside table, an ashtray, a book, The Hite Report.” These details place Catherine firmly in the vanguard of 1970s sexual liberation. Michele, by contrast, needs a great deal of wine before she kisses her husband, and frequently fakes blindness at his desire for her.

Catherine’s daughter, Bruce, so obsessed with Bruce Lee that she has taken his name, is left alone to explore her developing body as well as that of Michele’s son, Erwan, whom she befriends at school. Erwan’s sensitivity and clingy attachment to his mother change under the pressure of Bruce’s overwhelming physicality; they fight, wrestle, take off in a boat together, and invent a game called “Bordello” that requires each of them to choose a prostitute. No over-engineered playdates, no gender-affirmation here: this is good, old-fashioned 1970s parenting. Michele claws for the wine bottle each evening while Catherine collects her lovers; both mothers smoke and bronze themselves on the beach; Michele gives Catherine alibis for her sexual assignations and the children are left unsupervised to explore their nascent physicality.

Which is not to say that Michele does not love her son. Indeed, her love verges on obsession; she wages a constant, shocking internal war against Bruce, which occasionally manifests in acts of extreme spite—unkindness when her periods start during a play date, allowing her to walk home alone through the streets not caring is she gets home or not, failing to acknowledge her presence while ascribing to her the most venal of motivations towards Erwan. Michele’s commitment to motherhood is apparent from her luscious descriptions of the food she makes for Erwan and of the emotions she has for him, obsessively incanting spells and charms to keep him safely out of the clutches of Bruce. 

This maternal love is played out against the twin backdrops of the narrator’s sexual conflict and the creeping realisation that the expatriates are being spied on. The atmosphere is brooding and unsettling; the male gaze is omnipresent. A man follows Michele to the beach, and possessions are disturbed in the house. There are rumours of things found hidden in ceilings and water tanks. Michele even imagines Bruce “with a telescope, watching us, phoning us.” She writes, “I can’t get away from the feeling that someone wants to harm me, that I’m being spied on, that someone is waiting for me.” She is nostalgic for the streets of Paris where she walked “without fear of being insulted, spat at, stared at.” 

As a woman in a country where males are automatically accorded all the power, Michele toys with fantasies of submission and rape. She no longer desires her husband and develops an obsession with Catherine, whom she dreams of sexually overpowering. In Michele’s jasmine-scented garden, exotic plants suggest foreign places, but she herself feels uprooted, deracinated: “I have become empty flesh, a body vacated and ripe for the picking…”

The ending is shocking; Michele is determined to crush Bruce’s innocence as cruelly as she can before starting a new life as a librarian in her son’s school. Michele’s journey reflects that of her adopted country and perhaps that of all formerly colonised places. The days of lazy, exploitative expatriate life are over. Now Michele must commit to the future, roll up her sleeves, and work for a new master. The image of a country colonised then abandoned permeates the book: “Algeria has passed from one set of hands to another, like a pack of cards.” Everything has changed and so has nothing at all. 

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Nina Bouraoui (b. Rennes, 1967) is at the forefront of Francophone North African writing. She spent most of her childhood in Algeria and returned to France in 1980. Her critically acclaimed work includes a novel, La Voyeuse interdite, which won the Prix du Livre in 1991. In 2005, her book Mes Mauvaises Pensées was awarded the Prix Renaudot. 

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Aneesa Abbas Higgins is an award-winning translator of mostly literary fiction from French. Her translation of Nina Bouraoui’s All Men Want to Know was the recipient of a PEN Translates Award, and her translation of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho was the winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Before becoming a literary translator she taught French for many years in an international school in London.

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Educated in the West Indies, Saudi Arabia, Scotland and Belgium, Elizabeth Smith studied modern languages at Durham University in England. She reads anything she can, especially pre-war books by obscure women and modern European writers. She lives in an old house on a small island where she often pretends it is 1936.