One Way [Hardcover]

Didier Van Cauwelaert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2003

Winner of the Prix Goncourt and chosen by The Seattle Times as one of the Best Books of 2004

"One-Way is a funny and tender look at a world of shifting boundaries...Aziz Kemal is a protagonist for these times."
-Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

"Outrageously funny."
-The Seattle Times

"Mr. van Cauwelaert has a fine, light touch and makes Aziz the most charming and gentle of liars."
-The New York Sun

"A mad tale, funny and cruel, tender and inventive, in which all the hypocrisy of our society is put forward without ever becoming heavy-handed."
-Les Echos

Hailed as a marvel and awarded France's most prestigious literary prize, One-Way recounts the comic, absurd, and all-too-believable adventures of Aziz Kemal, a young Frenchman raised as an Arab by Marseilles gypsies. Arrested for a crime he didn't commit, Aziz becomes the target of a government campaign to repatriate illegal immigrants and finds himself en route to Morocco, despite the fact that he isn't Moroccan. Accompanying Aziz is a touchingly naive and neurotic "humanitarian attache" named Jean-Pierre Schneider, who drowns his own personal woes in his zeal to build a new life for his charge in a land neither one has ever seen.

It is on the plane to Morocco that events take an unexpected turn, when Aziz, pressed for details of a "birthplace" that isn't his, invents the fabulous story of Irghiz, a valley paradise hidden from the world and now in danger of ruin. From this moment on, the attache forgets his original assignment and has only one mission: to return Aziz to the Eldorado he left behind and save it from the ravages of modern progress. So begins an initiatory journey that takes Aziz, Jean-Pierre, and a disabused aristocrat across a desert both real and mythic, pursuing a vision of happiness as elusive as Irghiz itself.

At once humorous and poignant, the story of this journey is "a beautifully realized blend of sensitivity, humor, intelligence, and good sense—a rich and engaging novel, filled with a lucid and compassionate humanity" (Jean-Claude Lebrun).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Van Cauwelaert's tale of an orphan's quest for cultural identity won the Prix Goncourt when it was published in 1994, the year after France passed laws restricting immigration and the rights of current immigrants. Aziz Kemal is an immigrant himself, at least according to the false Moroccan papers he carries. In fact, he is French and an "accidental foundling." Raised, reluctantly, by the Gypsies who rescued him from the car crash that killed his parents, Aziz narrates his story with the breezy, elegant detachment of a double outsider in Marseilles. At times, the book feels more like a dramatic monologue than a novel, as Aziz steals car radios for a living, plays soccer and enjoys trysts with someone else's girl. But it also challenges ethnic and national identity in France: what is identity, the novel asks, other than a story we tell? When the immigration laws take effect, Aziz is deported to his supposed homeland of Morocco, a place he's only read about. Paired with Jean-Pierre Schneider, an immigration official assigned to accompany him, Aziz spins tales of an imaginary Moroccan past for Jean Pierre's files. Jean-Pierre is Aziz's perfect foil: he remembers all too well his own hard youth. In Morocco, the novel blooms deliciously into a buddy flick, a road trip, a love triangle and a metafictional comment on the reliability of narrators. When Aziz's narration is interrupted by an excerpt from Jean-Pierre's journal, the book is at its heartbreaking, hilarious best, perhaps because Van Cauwelaert is freed from his uneducated hero and allowed full use of high-minded absurdity, which he both revels in and pokes fun at.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

"I started out in life as an accidental foundling." From this arresting first sentence, readers are rapidly drawn into Cauwelaert's charmingly disarming story of an orphan's quest for identity. Through Polizzotti's rhapsodic translation from the original French, worlds both capricious and coarse, unreal and unpredictable collide in a lyrical ode to the power of storytelling that is as fanciful as any fable, as perplexing as any paradox. With no family and no home, Aziz, a young man of uncertain ethnicity, endures the mean streets of Marseilles by spinning fantasies that simultaneously redeem and rescue him. When arrested for possession of false documents, Aziz is deported to Morocco, his presumptive homeland, to a village that exists only in his imagination. Accompanied by a hapless diplomat who was similarly rejected and forsaken by his family, Aziz discovers a kindred spirit. Though only one will survive the journey, Aziz and Jean-Pierre forge a new life in this strikingly simple, yet mesmerizing, exploration of faith and friendship, desperation and determination. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 152 pages
• Publisher: Other Press (November 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590510860
• ISBN-13: 978-1590510865
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.7 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #648,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At Home in the Universe, June 2, 2004

By 

Lee Armstrong (Winterville, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Way (Hardcover)

Van Caulwelaert's novel reads well in its English translation from the original French. It is a magical tale with its own sense of reality, one where truthfulness takes a back seat to practicality & imagination. The irony of circumstances that send the book spiraling out of control are hilarious. I often found myself laughing aloud, something I rarely do from the written word. For example, once in Morocco, Aziz tries to impress the hotel that he has papers from King Hussein, only to be corrected by the travel guide that King Hussein is in Jordan while King Hassan is from Morocco. Aziz's false bravado throughout the tale makes him a fascinating protagonist.

The twist of fate that results in the baby being rescued from a burning car in Marseilles, given fake papers by his Gypsy rescuers with an Arabic name that proclaims him a citizen of Morocco, and then to be apprehended by the French government at his engagement party at age 19 to be repatriated to a country to which he has never been, whose language & customs he doesn't know, befriended by the French agent Jean-Pierre Schnieder and bedded by tour guide Valerie in Rabat is an engaging plot that keeps us waiting for the next unexpected development page after page. The gypsy customs are also hilariously odd as Aziz makes love to his girlfriend Lila by the back door so as to preserve her virginity for her fiancee Rajko. The episodic foray into the untamed Atlas Mountains is a journey of wonderful stupidity as Aziz bluffs his way further and further into the unknown toward his imaginary home of Irghiz.

While a translation, I found the dialogue and description riveting that made the pages zoom. The dust jacket proclaims that this book won France's highest literary prize. I found it to be wonderfully endearing and was sorry to let the characters go. Enjoy!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Surreal Quest, December 17, 2003

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: One Way (Hardcover)

Aziz Kemal is not his real name. He lives in Marseilles, France, with the Gypsies who rescued him from the car crash in which his parents died. He carries fake Moroccan papers and he's not sure who or what he really is. His specialty is stealing car radios and he is very good at it. He has a brief shot at happiness when he is to be engaged to Lila, but then, at the engagement party, he is arrested, and soon he will be deported as an illegal alien.

Where will he be sent? Why, Morocco of course, a land he has never visited and knows nothing about. The government has thoughtfully provided a "humanitarian attache" to accompany Aziz and help him get settled in his "homeland." So far, strange enough, but now things quickly get stranger and stranger. Asked to identify his home town he is forced to invent one, and the two of them set out earnestly trying to find it.

From the first page, the author makes it clear that he is not dealing in ordinary reality. This is a mythic book, a surrealistic allegory about identity. A person is nothing more or less than the stories he tells about himself, so it seems to be saying, stories that may be based in reality or made up out of whole cloth. Maybe even stories that belong to someone else. Author Cauwelaert explores this concept in flowing, readable prose.

Although the story begins in delightful absurd whimsy, it gradually becomes more somber, more convoluted, more self-consciously significant. In fact, it begins to drag. Although One-Way is a short book, it was a bit of an effort for me to finish it. I would recommend it with some reservations, a novel that is enjoyable, intriguing, but flawed. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

4.0 out of 5 stars Strangers in Strange Lands, January 15, 2011

By 

David Island "Excalibur" (San Rafael, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: One-Way (Paperback)

It's been a long time since I read Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," a science fiction novel, published in 1961, about Valentine Michael Smith, orphaned son of an astronaut who returns to earth in early adulthood after being raised by Martians. Didier van Cauwelaert's tidy little novel "One-Way" is not only fascinating (and beautifully translated from the original French by Mark Polizzotti), but its allegorical messages about the human condition -- no matter where we come from or where we live --speak volumes to readers as did Heinlein's novel.

This humorous, insightful novelette is about racism, immigration, emigration, aloneness, expatriation, alienation and love. Life is in fact a one-way ticket, and in the end we're all just visitors. Here, Aziz Kemal, the primary character and voice of the novel, is a 20 year old orphan in Marseilles who was raised as an Arab. He had perfect fake papers, identifying him as a Moroccan (which he was not), and so when snared by French authorities for a crime he did not commit, he was deported (accompanied by a French government attache) to - where else - Morocco, his "homeland." Hence, the story line.

"One-Way" is very funny, touchingly sad and greatly fanciful. I liked the episodes in France much better than those in Morocco, where our tolerance for the author's flights of fancy stretch our willingness to stay with his story. Aziz is a master at invention (and falsehood). His mastery of manipulation by untruth and creativity remains undiluted right through to the last page. After all, he grew up in the slums of Marseilles stealing car radios --- and survived to become a writer.

The structure of the story is unique and creative. Aziz eventually writes in first person the very story you are reading.

It's clever, fun and entertaining. Occasionally it is wise, and at all times it makes you think, such as when Aziz speaks to us on page 129, "I was no longer sure I wanted what I had chosen, but it was too late to turn back." Now isn't that just the awful truth more often than we would admit?

It's a solid 4.