Customer Reviews

Shantytown Kid

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Azouz Begag is one of the few arabs in France to have risen to a powerful position in the government. This is the story of his youth: his origins in a bidonville/slum outside of Lyon, where the difficult conditions are described with humor and love; his success in the French school system, his conflict with other arab children because of his insistence on succeeding scholastically; the broad leap in culture from the family in which he was born to modern French culture after the family moves to a subsidized high rise. The writer has a sense of humor that allows him to recount humiliating and harrowing incidents without resorting to self-pity or self-aggrandizement. A+!

The book took a couple of chapters to win me over, but it certainly did. What I like so much about the book, aside from its educational value and insight into life as the son of Algerian immigrants in 1960s France, was its perfect balance between humor and seriousness. I have read all too many memoirs that were either completely lighthearted (and thereby missing out on any emotional punch) or completely gloomy (thereby reducing the impact of truly serious moments by calling every single little thing tragic). This book, however, is both entertaining and very real to the reader. Azouz Begag doesn't shy away from truth, and you really get the sense that he has not spun the story in a certain direction or tried to make himself or his life look better or worse than they were.

I read this book for French class, and really enjoyed it even though it's not my typical genre. I would definitely recommend it to anyone considering reading it.

Begag was born in 1957 into an Arab Algerian family living in Lyon, and his family stayed in France even after Algerian independence. He has held high governmental posts in France and is a noted French author and spokesman on matters pertaining to Arab immigrants in France.

SHANTYTOWN KID is Begag's account of growing up as a boy in "La Chaaba", a small patch of land between an expressway and the Rhone River just outside Lyon, up against a river embankment and next to a dump, where a group of Algerian Arabs lived in a small community consisting of a concrete house and wooden shanties built against and around it, with a communal hand-operated water pump and a communal privy. The physical conditions were primitive, but not as wretched as in many slums and refugee camps around the world, and at least Begag's father had regular work as a laborer. Still, Begag and his family had to cope with being outcasts among the French, and after Algerian independence, the typical French attitude towards them and other Arabs from Algeria was, "So, when are you going back to your country?" Among Arab immigrants, Begag was better able to deal with the discrimination and to integrate into French society because of strong family support of his education in mainstream French schools, the fortuity of having several inspirational and unprejudiced teachers, and (probably) the strength of his own character and intellect.

Thus, in concept at least, the youth of Azouz Begag is promising material for an autobiography or memoir. The introduction to this edition refers to the book as an "autobiographical novel"; my speculation is that the fictional element enters in primarily through the heavy reliance on dialogue, which must have been re-constructed, to carry the narrative. Given the subject matter, I would like to be able to praise SHANTYTOWN KID, but I cannot. A minor complaint is that the boyish Azouz comes across as a prig. The major problem is that the book is very simplistically written, as if for young teenagers. For that audience it is worth reading, given its undoubted instructional value as to the plight of immigrants like Azouz Begag having to grow up in "two vastly different sociocultural spaces" (to quote from the book's useful introduction). But for adults, the book is far too plain and simple-minded.