[3.5] I can see why this is taught in schools (as another reviewer notes, it's a French A-Level text in England), but am surprised, in a good way, that it was longlisted, back in 2007, for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (precursor to the current format of the Booker International).

Translated, it's a very easy read, basically YA, though for a reader of French around A-Level standard, the slang will take a bit of getting used to. Subject-wise, it technically has that realist 'worthiness' characteristic of the IFFP - it's about an impoverished French-Moroccan teenage girl living on a tough estate on the outskirts of Paris - but it's not in the least dry, so 'worthy' wasn't an adjective that occurred to me until afterwards. This book didn't exist when I was doing A-levels, but Kiffe Kiffe plus an older classic would be a better choice than two of the latter, and certainly gives a less rarefied view of France than the likes of Marcel Pagnol.

It's also potentially educational in that there's a lot to look up about French pop culture of the late 90s and early 00s, the sort of casual references you might get IRL: e.g. saying someone looks like a certain daytime TV presenter. (The book makes sense without knowing all these references, but I enjoy finding out this sort of stuff. If you like to look things up as you go, it means that this otherwise very straightforward book might not be the most convenient read for public transport.)

Narrator Doria's voice may grate for some readers (and the ending is perhaps a bit too neat in that YA way). I have never understood why so many older child and teenage narrators pepper their stories with "I wish [really bad thing] would happen to [so and so]". I don't remember thinking this about more than one or two people (and it's not like I was having a great time socially or at home), and I can't ever remember other kids saying it. In books I've read in adulthood, I've usually thought of it as lazy shorthand for a more inchoate childish and youthful dissatisfaction, but as Faïza Guène wrote this when she was still a teenager herself, and she grew up on an estate like Doria's, where many people have far greater material hardship than most of my old classmates, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt in the way that I wouldn't to a well-meaning middle-class 45 year old trying to write the same character.

Some contemporary readers may feel that a certain plot point needs more exploration and discussion, especially for teen readers: when Doria decides she fancies a boy who, a few weeks / months earlier kissed her without her consent, and whom she had previously found quite repellent - and it's clearly presented as a good thing by the end of the book. It struck me how this wouldn't have seemed anything remarkable in fiction, or a magazine anecdote, 20 or even 10 years ago - although by then a similar reaction to being 'ravished' would have been considered off, and bad writing, by many. One could now consider it as a reaction shaped by Doria's dysfunctional family background - which must have been pretty bad as the family had a social worker (although perhaps France allocates them when things are less bad than UK threshholds) - or a lingering subconscious effect of the patriarchal culture she is in many other ways managing to shake off. It's also an example of a popular trope of the 90s and 00s, the nerd gets the girl. But to make it just about the character neglects changing general norms - which have possibly changed more among the young and among Anglo-American liberals than elsewhere. And I find it very interesting as an example of inner emotions changing rapidly - seeing in action the stuff covered by the scholarly field of the history of emotions I referred to the other day in reviewing Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home. It was sad to see how often Doria referred to commercial women's magazines as ways she and others learned about life and relationships (and to shape their views of what was and was not appropriate to feel and do) but also sadly accurate for pre-www girls who had negligible useful support from people they knew. I was kind of glad magazines have waned, but on the consumerism and fashion front, they seemed quite benign compared with what you hear about Instagram and teens now.

I found Kiffe Kiffe really interesting. Contemporary fiction about immigrants, and about poorer people (who aren't struggling creatives) in other European countries is something I've long wanted to read more of, but not much is translated. (And when it is, it's rarely as approachable as this.)

Quick read, and not boring-per-se, but I didn't really think that the book was particularly insightful. The main character was conventionally sassy in a funny way - but, again, nothing particularly worth writing home about… and the ending was a little cheesy for me…

La vie dans une cité vue par une gamine de 15 ans issue de l'immigration, sans père avec une mère analphabète et courageuse. Une style agressif, aussi jeune que l'héroïne, une lecture qui laisse un goût après sur la langue et de l'espoir dans les coeurs. J'ai énormément aimé cette lecture

Sharp insightful look into immigrant life in Paris in this journal-as-a-novel. Well worth it.

No one is better than the French to write about bullying.
For the acceptance part they still have time, I suppose.

↠ 3.5 stars

The title of this book, Kiffe kiffe demain, must give translators nightmares. The problem is that it’s a play on words, and not just on any normal words, but ghetto slang. “Kif kif” is vernacular roughly meaning “same ‘ole, same ‘ole”; “kiffer” is vernacular meaning “to like/love”. The title has a bittersweet tang derived from the opposing feelings of despair (“same ‘ole shit tomorrow”) and hope (“loving tomorrow”). That title must also give those tight-arsed asshats at the French Academy nightmares. “But zis is ghetto Frrench! Quelle horreur!”

The book is set in the banlieues, which a dictionary will misleadingly translate as “suburbs”. This is not, however, Desperate Housewives territory: middle-class angst is more the preserve of the ill-de-la-cité. The banlieues are the French version of community housing with all the attendant connotations that entails. Its American equivalent is Harlem or the ghetto, and yes, the ambivalence (or just downright racism) of the French to these members of the population is their equivalent of the white-black divide in America. So much for liberté, égalité, et fraternité eh?

Call the book a French mash-up, if you will, of Catcher in the Rye and The Invisible Man. It’s got that perfectly realised adolescent tone of scorn and angst, and the well-aimed barbs at the system of racism. It’s not a one-sided polemic, however. Doria, the heroine, is as critical of her fellow residents with their sexism and narrow-mindedness as she is of French racism. It’s also more hopeful than that pairing of American classics would suggest. As much as Guène punctures French racism, she also acknowledges how the French social safety net can be helpful: for example, Doria’s mother is able to get a better job through free literacy classes provided by the state.

The comparison with Catcher in the Rye and The Invisible Man is as much to suggest that this work deserves to become a French classic. Not because it’s “Lit-ruh-chuh”, but almost precisely because it’s not. It’s a blast of fresh air through the self-satisfied, whiney navel-gazing going on in a lot of celebrated current French novels. For all the adolescent POV, the novel is refreshingly unself-centered. And in daring to put forth for the very first time in French literature a poor marginalised heroine like Doria front and centre of a literary work as a person wholly deserving of an equal place in the country of the bleu-blanc-rouge, Guène follows in the footsteps of Victor Hugo and Collette. And like her predecessors, she deserves as much to be called French as they are.

Check out the Guardian interview with Faïza Guène, and recent reportage by Al Jazeera on the problem of discrimination in France.

* Best line in the book for me: "En France, trois mots en "iste", ça suffit pour qu'on donne ton nom à un lycée, une rue, une bibliothèque ou une station de métro." (In France, [if you can be described with] three words with the suffix "ist" (e.g., journalist, socialist, unionist), that's all it takes for your name to be given to a school, a road, a library, or a subway station.)

Tagebuchartig gestalteter Roman einer jungen Marokkanerin, die in der pariser Banlieu aufwächst. Stilistisch ist das schnoddrige Alltagssprache in französisch-arabisch/maghrebinischem Dialekt, was die Lektüre nicht gerade einfach, aber eben enorm interessant gemacht hat. Mein Arsenal an Schimpfworten ist nun gut gefüllt.

Das Buch erzählt keine zusammenhängende Geschichte, sondern vermittelt einzelne Szenen und Ausrisse aus dem Alltagsleben der Anti-Heldin. Allerdings fügen sich die Miniaturen im Verlauf der Erzählung zu einem immer geschlosseneren und schlüssigen Gesamtbild zusammen, das einen großartigen Einblick in diese - mir doch recht fremde - Welt bietet.

Ein toller Roman, den man vorbehaltlos empfehlen kann. Unbedingt lesenswert.

For a french book this really wasn’t bad at all but i still hate reading in french so 3 stars it is

Great! Not technically published as YA, apparently, but I will be assigning it to my class for its hella resonance.

Quite a different style, a unique voice that to read, feels like it might be to spend an afternoon with Doria, who is 15 and deplete of any enthusiasm for life, her father has gone back to Morocco to marry a younger, more fertile woman, her illiterate mother is learning to read and write and Doria is being forced to drop out of school.

It's a stream of consciousness narrative in teen-speak, which suffers a little in translation, but ultimately provides an insight into the life of a girl living in a part of suburban Paris that isn't known for elevating one's position in life.

My complete review here at Word by Word.

I read this book for French class. It wasn't a bad book, but there were some parts that I didn't understand. The book was good and I really love the ending of it

Not very much "beur" literature has made its way to the U.S. in English translation, so it's nice to see that Guene's French bestseller made the voyage since originally appearing in 2004 (and in 25 other languages since). The term "beur" is a French slang term referring to Arab North African (Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian) immigrants living in France, and generally includes those who've been born in France. Like most immigrant populations, it's one that's been largely marginalized, with all the attendant social problems that leads to (witness the widespread riots of late 2005). Here, the beur experience is voiced by a 15-year-old Moroccan girl, Doria, who lives with her mother in a large tower block in suburban Paris projects. Abandoned by their father/husband, who moved back to Morocco to wed a woman who would produce a son, the two women live an impoverished life of thrift store clothes, shiny social workers, food vouchers, school counselors, and minimum wage jobs.

In very brief (generally 3-6 page) chapters, Doria rambles on about her day to day life, which she spends largely isolated from her peers and fairly bitter about the die fate has cast for her. However, she's not a shallow teenybopper griping about her wardrobe (although that is a significant problem), rather, she's aware enough to understand the long-term hopelessness of her and her mother's situation and righteous enough to be angry about it. There's not a lot of plot, the book follows more of a journal format as a series of small scenes. The main topics are her running crush on an older local ex-dealer, interludes with various social workers, tutoring by a nerdish boy, watching TV, her first kiss, a job babysitting, and the start of hairdressing school. Interwoven with all this is the to-be-expected critique of the traditional Arab patriarchy, which comes out not only through her own story, but that of her mother's best friend, as well as that of a neighborhood girl kept imprisoned by her father and brother. While valid, it gets a little too heavy handed at times, as do some of the book's symbolism. For example, the projects they live in are called "Paradise Estates" and when the daughter and mother visit the Eiffel Tower, they can't afford the tickets to ride up it. One somewhat surprising conclusion one can draw from the book is that despite the general structural deficiencies of modern French society, some of the social safeguards actually do help (such as the welfare assistance delivered by various grating women, or the free job training offered to the mother).

Somewhat unfairly, various critics have compared this debut to White Teeth, The Catcher in the Rye, and (oddly) Bridget Jones's Diary, which is somewhat overselling it. Guene is not nearly the stylistic talent Zadie Smith is, nor is the book as comic (or navelgazing) as the Bridget Jones' series, and thankfully, it's not as lame as the Salinger's vastly overrated book. Instead, this is a quick-reading worthwhile portrait of a side of French society that needs more visibility, and a story which ends on a somewhat hopeful note. It seems like perhaps a good book to use with teenagers to discuss issues of multiculturalism and class, as it is quite short and easily digested.