If there’s one thing writers love to write about, it’s being a writer. In this practice – where writing about what you know is taken to the extreme – there’s a particular subset in which writing is treated as a fragile thing, a gift to the writer that must be approached with care to stop the muse being frightened off. Leo Tolstoy, when asked by an anxious editor what was happening with the book he had paid such a handsome advance for, replied: “Anna Karenina has left. I am waiting for her to return.”
For every Tolstoy, there’s a Vladimir Nabokov, who, when asked in an interview about the experience some writers describe of the characters taking control of the story, responded: “What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.”
The French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani is on team Tolstoy. In her new nonfiction work, The Scent of Flowers at Night (translated by Sam Taylor), she acknowledges the Nabokovian view by saying: “If I told them it’s the subjects [of our novels] that choose us, not the other way around, they would probably mark me down as pretentious or insane.” She goes on: “But the truth is that my novels seek me out; they devour me.”
There is a lot of this sort of thing in The Scent of Flowers at Night, which is ostensibly about a night Slimani spent alone in the Punta della Dogana museum in Venice in April 2019; but the experience is really a framing device for her to pin down passing thoughts, memories and quotations from other writers. “Writing,” she says, “is a sort of imprisonment,” and means “giving up on happiness, on the little joys of everyday life” – echoing the thoughts of writers everywhere who have forgotten or never known what it’s like to have a real job. And you can’t help but think if it’s true that “writing is a way of playing with silence”, that “literature is made up of an erotica of silence”, then she doesn’t half go on about it.
Fortunately, the book takes on more strength and shape when Slimani accepts the limitations of literature – a simulacrum of life – and turns to life itself. She recalls how her father “piled [books] up at his feet like a builder piling up bricks to construct a wall”. For him, “books were the fortress in which he locked himself away”. Yet, she acknowledges, even as we believe in writing as a memorial tool, honouring those we don’t want to forget: “My words, instead of giving [my father] life, are transforming him into a character, betraying him.”
She is at her best – vivid and capable of transporting the reader – on her childhood in the Moroccan capital of Rabat, recollecting the call to prayer, reflecting on the changes to the city since her youth. When she moved to France at the age of 17, she “had the impression that I knew this country, that I understood its codes, its culture, its language” – all, of course, because of the French colonial presence in her homeland. And it was only “in France”, where she was suddenly a foreigner, “that I became an Arab” – even if her background in a French-speaking Moroccan family meant that she was “the kind of Arab they like”.
Arab culture, she notes, is “steeped in nomadism, in the idea of living day to day”, adding, inspired by the words of the prophet Muhammad: “Man’s presence in the world is ephemeral, and we should not get too attached to it.” It’s a down-to-earth maxim that some writers would do well to remember.
• The Scent of Flowers at Night by Leïla Slimani (translated by Sam Taylor) is published by Coronet (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
