Books: Married Enemies

STRANGERS (174 pp.)—Albert Memmi —Orion ($3.50).

Most of the endless flow of novels about broken marriages rest on a few well-tried fictional supports: the triangle, intrusion of job or career, incapacity to keep loving, failure to communicate. Most such books read as if they were inspired by the stale, paid advice of a marriage counselor. In Strangers, Tunisian Novelist Albert Memmi writes with relentless can dor of a far grimmer marital crack-up in a far more ferocious setting than is usually found in the bored, semi-Freudian cold war between American husbands and wives. If Author Memmi’s lovers never have a chance, it takes marriage to prove it. If they part in bitterness, they at least spell out the causes.

The marriage Memmi describes is “mixed.” The hero-narrator is a Tunisian Jew studying medicine in Paris. Marie is a young Alsatian student from a Catholic family. At first the very difference in their backgrounds acts as a spur to their love. When Marie learns that he wants to return to Tunisia to practice among his people, she readily agrees to go with him. But in Tunisia they are met by her husband’s family, a noisy, colorful clan she was wholly unprepared for. Their food seems outlandish, their curiosity rude. After the long drawn-out, seemingly crude Passover celebration, she cannot conceal her disgust: “I never thought I was saying goodbye to prejudice and superstition at home simply to find myself plunging here into barbarism!”

The trouble is that Marie’s husband is himself at odds with his background yet determined to force his wife to melt into it. The members of the clan jolly her with well-meant but offensive pleasantries (“Beware, madame! You’re too slim; we like them well covered”); one old aunt shows her joy at their visit to her house by filling her mouth with orange water and squirting them with it. Marie resents the dirty restaurants, and he gets even by suggesting a local delicacy, grilled sheep’s testicles. Before long, he manages to devise a hurt to meet each of her objections. During one of their recurring fights, he has to resist the impulse to strike her, and then the truth reaches him too. Throwing the word “coward” at him, Marie, pregnant again, sets out to visit an abortionist and finally a lawyer. Strangers is a grim little book but an uncompromisingly honest one. Author Memmi confines himself to a careful, patient piling up of telling detail and harsh, spare dialogue that conveys its own message: love, intelligence and good will are not enough when caught in the blind struggle between alien cultures.