July 2021 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club
As a teenager,
Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African
American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state
of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white
sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe
haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is
under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and
go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black
American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in
love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At
the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly
the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is
struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are
regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French
police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to
the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with
Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer
remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where
his true loyalties lie.