Watch Us Dance #

Leila Slimani #

October 22, 2024

4/5

This is a really interesting book, though a lot of my interest in this book is based on circumspantial interest.

I first learned about this book through The Shakespeare and Company Podcast, where the author had come to the bookstore to talk about the book and related interests. This particular episode of the podcast has been probably one of the most interesting ones that they had put out, at least from my listening history, though I hadn’t decided to go on and read the novel until I listened to it again a few months ago.

Potential spoilers ahead

I think going in with the extra information I had about the novel played to its benifit. So to did knowing about May 1968 in Paris and also knowing some other information about student life and the ideals of being young in France at the time. Of course, this is noted both in the podcast episode and in the book (I found it very amusing when Jacques Brel was mentioned). I also knew a bit about the fringes of American life in the late 60s and 70s, which plays into this book as well.

It’s particularly interesting: a lot of the book feels incredibly French, like unavoidably so. Everybody wants to distinguish themselves as different but end up doing much the same as the French youth. But is it even “French”? I could probably replace that with America and its meaning might still be somewhat the same (though America did not colonize Morocco). It also feels like the previous generation. Everybody wants to distinguish their generation as being the unique bearmarker to which following generations will see and recognize the major earth-shattering changes that shall take place. But so too does each generation end up doing much the same as the past. Is each generation, at least the standard bearers of each generation, they who want to make great change to the world in the name of progress, is the experience of all these standard bearers and all the people who have hope universal? Is their perspectives on the past (be it the France, America, and older generation) purely frustration? Or is there some masked admiration?

In hindsight the optimism of the youth may seem absurd. Though maybe I only find it absurd because I don’t know many people who feel triumphal about the future. Ironically enough, that same feeling is very normal too, and is represented across all generations. Every generation has the ego to think it the last one.

Read the book!