The Sand Dunes of Paris by Edna Shemesh. Literary Review

Literary critic and author Edna Shemesh is a staunch Francophile, so it is no wonder that her first novel (which is, to be more precise, her second book) takes place in the City of Lights. It is a psychological thriller that tells the story of the apprenticeship of Albert, a young Jewish immigrant, who comes to help his uncle Mardoch in his vegetable shop in the Marais district. The uncle also rents him a small apartment, not far away. Padina, Albert's mother, from one of the last Jewish families still living in a small village in the Maghreb, on the edge of the desert, on the border of the sand dunes, sends him to her brothers because there is no longer any livelihood and no future in their place. Albert, torn from his familiar world, his family and the love of his youth – Maryse, was destined for a new life in the big city and hard work in his uncle's vegetable shop. Slowly he acclimatizes in the city, cracks the local codes, meets very different people from each other and finds friends and acquaintances, some real, some fake. He saves money, dreams dreams and thinks about his future, until a random murder occurs in the vegetable store and destroys the cards.

The Sand Dunes of Paris – The Birth of Roman

This is how Edna Shemesh tells about the birth of the book, in an interview she gave to Carmit Sapir Weitz:

The Sand Dunes of Paris was born from my long stay in the Marais district of Paris for four consecutive summers, two to three months each summer. Already in the second summer of my stay in Paris, I began writing the book, in the small, well-decorated apartment of Dr. Jean-Pierre Lechaud, a retired doctor who often volunteers in African countries as an abdominal surgeon. The window of the small apartment, on the fourth floor of a building near the Place des Vosges, was Albert’s vantage point for the life passing by.

A long stay in a city – no matter how beautiful – eventually reveals its true face, hidden from the eyes of a tourist in love. Thus, the homeless Jean-Luc, Rachel the clothing store owner, Teto the tattooed Muslim and capoeira lover, Shehadeh, the jade competitor across the street, the world of Africans from the Maghreb and Black Africa were born into the book.

And Edna Shemesh reveals more about the secrets of the story behind the book, in an interview with the website Books, Writers and Everything in Between:

I started writing during my first long summer in Paris in 2009, and I finished the initial draft at the end of the summer of 2011. And since the real writing of a book (for me at least) only begins after I write the 'end' – the delicate work of polishing, which is equally agonizing and enjoyable, continued afterwards, in Israel. I put the final touches on it at the end of last summer at the Prima Royal Hotel, on Mendeli Mocher Sfarim Street in Jerusalem, after I was fortunate enough to be granted a two-week stay at the hotel to write. Since then, somehow, the Parisianness of the book has always mixed in my mind with the scents of Jerusalem, where I finally put the pen down (meaning I gave the order to keep the file) and knew that the book was finished.

And another secret about the opening point of the book:

One night I looked out the window, into the square courtyard, four stories below me, and suddenly I heard moans of love in the evening air. The alertness I was alert to and the embarrassment I felt, along with a healthy curiosity that had awakened in me, became the alertness of my hero, Albert, his embarrassment and his ashamed curiosity, the excitement he felt. As the tourist shell fell away from me, a new and exciting point of view opened up to me: I began to feel and see the city's streets, its homeless, its immigrants, and its incessant breathing through Albert's eyes and senses.

Young Albert feels an inexplicable attraction to a strange girl, moaning love moans in the arms of a strange boy. What is it with him and her? What is the meaning of the unremitting desire that grips him for a faceless girl whose voice he has only heard under special circumstances? “He had no more doubts. He hears love moans. For a moment he is enveloped in shame and embarrassment, as if he were an accomplice in a crime, as if he had pierced a hole in the wall with a bleeding finger, through the layer of paint, and through the layer of lime, and through the hard bricks, and he peers through it to where she lies and looks. And listens.” (pp. 7-8).

The image of the unusual love triangle, whose sides here are Alber and an unknown couple, is embedded in the thriller, and will recur over and over again in even more surprising versions. It would be a shame to give a spoiler, but this is the opportunity to quote more of the illustration of the picture, as a sample of Edna Shemesh's writing art: "Now that black, fluttering Basis, who fluttered between the walls, seized with panic, concentrated his thoughts in order to remove from his mind the image that desired to push the image of the frightened bird away from him: a man and a woman lying naked in bed on the other side of the wall, closer to him than he wanted, both of them - her head on his arm, his seed on her thigh, as if they were forcing him by their very existence to take part in their act of love, making him involuntarily a voyeur, a pervert for a moment, arousing his lust. He turned over on his stomach and buried his head in the faded cushion of the pillow. "Mariz, Mariz," he muttered, even though he knew he would never see her again, probably ever." (p. 9)

Albert will never see Maryse again, but he will soon see, to his horror, the bloody body of his uncle who was murdered in his shop. And soon he will peel the paint and whitewash off several old Parisians, real Frenchmen, not immigrants, who live some in luxury apartments with marble floors, some on the sidewalk, watching from the wall of a building, wrapped in a duvet. And soon he will also reveal the secrets of his family, friends, and acquaintances and see them naked. As for the groaning Anais, her identity will be revealed at the end of the thriller, but she will remain ideal and unattainable, another side in an impossible triangle.

This is not the only paradox that emerges from the novel. Who murdered Murdoch Levi? Not who you might think. Albert, who is investigating Anais, who is investigating Paris, is also investigating his uncle's murderer. Albert invades the intimate lives of others, discovers their secrets, the brick walls they build to shape their lives that sometimes crumble to dust. And in the process, he also thinks about himself, his future, the real and the fake. Will he want to continue running the vegetable store in the Marais for a long time? Distant Israel, to which Rachel-Rachel emigrated after selling her clothing store, arouses his curiosity and even beckons him. Will the sensitive and tormented Albert learn the art of climbing the sand dunes of life not only as an observer from a bird's eye view. It seems that his younger brother, Taher, is wearing more comfortable walking shoes. Taher, who has grown up to be an attractive young man, also comes to try his luck in Paris. Like Albert, he too begins his adult life in the vegetable store, the life's work of Uncle Murdoch, where the latter found his death.

A Francophile love song to Paris

And within the entire fabric, within political-social touches, within the characters’ expressions of feelings of detachment and belonging, within reflections on the essence of life, all of which is fascinating in itself under the writer’s pen, beats a love song from a sworn Francophile to Paris. At first, Edna Shemesh saw her with loving, veiled eyes, “as one loves a new lover,” and as time passed, she, the city, continued to be a lover but not a new one. The veil was lifted, from the eyes of the observer and from his love.

And finally, one of the theories of the city, a memory of Albert from a joint trip with his uncle Murdoch, Saint-Louis in the evening: “Albert remembers: the evening was wrapped in beautiful twilight. At first the light spread across the sky, above the bridges, then it slowly retreated and seemed to gather into one disappearing point. An unusual silence reigned around them. The water of the river slowly darkened, the lanterns on the bridges flashed, yellow and warm, and colored the water with their warmth. The hue of the sky deepened until it became a poisonous blue and finally darkened, like the water. He also remembers: wherever they went, a half-eaten moon followed them, and the powerful spotlight at the top of the distant Eiffel Tower threw beams of bluish light into the sky that fumbled around and went out. The air cooled. Albert and his uncle walked together, unwittingly coordinating the length of their steps. Murdoch’s hands were clasped together Behind his slightly hunched back, Albert's hands were stuck deep in his pants pockets.” (p. 86). The description of the city merges with the characters' emotions and fate.

Edna Shemesh, The Sand Dunes of Paris, Kibbutz Hameuhad Publishing, 2013