La forme de la vieillesse dans Le bonheur a la queue glissante d’Abla Farhoud

Abstract

A sixty-five-year-old woman, the novel’s narrator tells the story of her life as a Lebanese immigrant in Canada. Through the lens of old age, she encompasses the complexity of the relation of the self with the world, family, language, and transmission of experience—all that with objectivity and humility, the goal being to tell the truth that has been hidden for so long. Thus, through her heroine who for the first time, at an advanced age, gets to have a life of her own, the writer shows that rather than failure, ageing can also be an opportunity to become oneself at last—though literature doesn’t tend to cast a such light on old age. Given how the content and the goal of the life’s story meet in this novel, I will analyse how Abla Farhoud creates a new form of writing of the self through the point of view of old age.