Silenced Voices in Sebastian Faulks’s Novel Paris Echo

Abstract

In the novel two individuals from dissimilar spatio-cultural backgrounds alternate in first-person narration. The voices are Hannah’s, a 31-year-old American postdoctoral researcher, who comes to Paris to investigate the empirical history of French women during the German Occupation, and Tariq’s, a nineteen-year-old Moroccan runaway. Hannah engages Tariq to assist her with interviews of witnesses still alive and translations of the recorded testimonies that were hardly ever raised to public awareness. The two narrators share the non-committal starting position that is for the American based on her scholarly approach from overseas and for Tariq on his adventurous youth, as on his ignorance of Europe and French (colonial) history. The question how to acknowledge the visibilised is addressed on several narrative and generational levels: in the embedded stories told at different times by the witnesses, and in the explorers’ response to the accounts they are confronted with in their dislocated situation.

Keywords

• Sebastian Faulks
• historical novel
• migration
• France
• Occupation
• collected memory