In So Close, the internationally renowned writer Hélène Cixous
recounts a return to her native Algeria after a more than thirty-year
absence. Before she can decide to go, she must sift through large parts
of her past in a land where she never felt at home and, from a young
age, knew she must leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her
mother's rejection of the country that had rejected her despite years of
devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is struggling with this
decision, she receives a message from Zohra Drif, with whom she has had
no contact since their school days, which was just before Zohra joined
the Algerian FLN and become a heroine in the uprising against French
rule in her homeland. They meet in Paris for the first time in more than
fifty years and soon afterward the narrator departs for Algiers.
The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations,
impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits sites
from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of her birth,
the city of the family's happiness before her father's death when she
was a young girl. The quest to find his grave again in the overgrown
Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads to a startlingly moving scene that
closes the voyage and the book.
