[ book tip by Translated Tips ] Stephanie Cabre writes about the French edition of Mes mauvaises pensées - it has not been translated into any other language
This is a book that cannot leave you indifferent, because Nina Bouraoui's Mes mauvaises pensées is more than a novel; it is the story of a confession.

Nina Bouraoui is a French author born of an Algerian father and a French mother. She has inherited from both cultures and has never hidden her attraction to women in her books. All of her books are very personal. In her ninth work, the Franco-Algerian author continues her inward-looking quest but this time imagines herself on her shrink's couch.

'I have come to see you because I have bad thoughts. My soul is consuming itself; I am besieged.'

Nina Bouraoui explores the conscious and the unconscious with the same predominant themes as in her previous novels: Algeria, family, love for women. Mes mauvaises pensées is therefore the story of a life, a long letter confession to a therapist in which the memories spring up pele mele, in a complete state of disorder. From her childhood in Algiers up to fourteen years of age, to her arrival in France, the country of her mother, passing by her stories of love, in no particular chronological order. We meet her father, her mother, the Friend, the Singer, the writer Hervé Guibert; Nina Bouraoui offers us her French, Algerian, girl, boy intimacy all at the same time:

'I think I am proud to be my father's son, and his extension because we have the same mind, the same humour, the same fragility faced with the fascinating gentleness of women (...) I have often thought that my writing came from my mother (…) I now know that the writing comes from him, he who wrote so much in Algiers.'

In its turn both violent and sensual the writing of Nina Bouraoui is unique and one either loves or hates it.
Without neither chapter nor paragraph the work is composed of sinuous phrases that may repulse the reader. At 37 years of age “Mes mauvaises pensées” is Nina Bourraoui's 9th work. She received the Prix Renaudot in 2005. She has already enjoyed success with her first novel, 'la voyeuse interdite' which won the Inter book prize in 1991. She has also written La vie heureuse and Poupée bella.

[ book info ] Bouraoui, Nina: Mes mauvaises pensées. Éditions Stock, 2005 .