Our Riches

January 13, 2020
Adimi’s illuminating English-language debut unearths a legendary Algerian lending library and bookstore in parallel narratives. In 1935, French-Algerian Edmond Charlot slowly builds a small publishing empire, releasing books by Albert Camus and other luminaries and opening the Les Vraies Richesses bookshop in Algiers. In 2017, 20-year-old French university student Ryad lands the job of clearing out the shuttered bookshop to make room for a new beignet spot, fulfilling a requirement for his engineering degree. As Ryad interacts with Abdallah, an elderly former bookseller from the shop’s early days, he learns the history of the building he’s been tasked with gutting. These chapters alternate with Charlot’s diary entries, accounting for the bookstore’s 26-year rise and fall, detailing paper shortages during WWII, company turmoil, and Charlot’s sense of being an outsider in the publishing world. Meanwhile, Ryad befriends a young woman named Sarah, and from her and Abdallah learns how important the bookstore’s legacy is to the city and becomes inspired to embrace Charlot’s motto for the shop: “The young, by the young, for the young.” Adimi’s confident prose displays Ryad and Charlot’s emotional depth while nimbly shuttling the reader through nearly a century of history. This is a moving tribute to the enduring power of literature.

February 15, 2020
An understated, lyrical story of reading and resistance over the tumultuous generations. "For centuries the sun has been rising over the terraces of Algiers, and for centuries, on those terraces, we have been killing each other." So writes Adimi in the first of her novels to be translated into English, a story that unfolds over decades, beginning in 1936, when a young pied noir named Edmond Charlot (who was a real person) buys a tiny bookstore in Algiers. He calls it Les Vraies Richesses, meaning something like "the true wealth." In time he starts a publishing house, discovering a young Albert Camus. World War II follows, and Charlot battles censorship and paper shortages; then comes the Algerian War, and though readers continue to come to his store, no one has any money: "When I can, I slip them something I love and say, 'Take it: fix me up later, ' " Charlot records in his journal. Adimi recounts Charlot's inspiring passion for books and ideas through his own voice and those of others, including one of his converts, a now old man named Abdallah, who tends to the store long after the death of its founder. But the Algerian authorities have no use for such secular spaces; as a journalist notes, "The government is sacrificing culture to build mosques on every street corner!" A young man named Ryad, an engineering student, is sent to clean out and refurbish the space. "Destroying a bookstore, you call that work?" Abdallah, who wears a shroud around his shoulders so that "the day God calls me, they'll be able to bury me straight away," asks the dutiful young man. The books he is sent to trash eventually enrapture Ryad, of course. Populated by the ordinary citizens of Algiers and such figures from French literary history as Robert Aron and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Adimi's gently spun story takes an ominous turn as it nears its end, when the secret police turn up with increasing frequency, their "mustaches, sunglasses, dark suits" the uniform of the enemies of literature. A lovely book about books--and freedom.

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Starred review from April 1, 2020

Adimi makes her English-language debut with this elegant and affecting Prix Goncourt short-listed, multi-prize-winning work, which reimagines the history of Les Vraies Richesses, a bookstore/library blend opened in 1936 Algiers by young Edmond Charlot, who also served as enterprising publisher to significant authors including Albert Camus. The story takes the visionary Charlot from Algiers to World War II Paris (where he opened a branch of his business) to pointedly depicted postwar agitation for Algerian independence, weaving in an account of contemporary plans to turn the bookstore--which had become a national library annex--into a beignet shop. Hapless Ryad, charged with cleaning out the store, simply cannot understand what it has meant to the well-etched community (not to mention literary history): "We are the people of this city and our memory is the sum of all our stories." VERDICT Both gorgeous paean to literature and historically astute observation; highly recommended for book lovers everywhere.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 4, 2020
This historical novel is Adimi's third but just her first to be translated into English. Short-listed for the Prix Goncourt, it received the Prix Renaudot and three other major prizes. The book is a sort of fictional biography of an institution: Les Vraies Richesses, a bookstore and publishing house, founded in 1936 in Algiers by Edmond Charlot. Charlot had luck, tenacity, loyalty, and excellent taste. The first to publish Albert Camus, by the time he opened a second office in Paris in 1945, just after the war ended, he was publishing Jean Giono (the store name is the title of one of his stories), Georges Bernanos, Andr� Gide, Alberto Moravia, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. The novel tacks back and forth between the present day and Charlot's time. We are given excerpts from Charlot's diary and the desultory efforts of Ryad, a youth who comes from Paris to dispose of the store's inventory. The book is perhaps too neat and uplifting; it is, quite possibly, a story the French might like to hear about their former colony. Even so, the store's motto is worth a monument: "One who reads is worth two who don't."

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