« Safari » by Sabri Louatah, strange Gabriel – Liberation

“My goal as a novelist is to usually get used to darkness. Give a physiognomy to the nightmares that haunt us ”, said Sabri Louatah recently on France Culture. As a nightmare idea, 404his previous novel, told the impossibility of socially distinguishing the false from the true. With Safarithe author rises in intensity by installing the same disorder directly in the narrator’s head. This time there is no external cause to which to impute what will take place but it seems a congenital impossibility to differentiate the real from what is not. The narrator is also affected by a view at the edge of blindness, the first metaphorical step of a distorting aptitude the world. We enter Safari on one level.

In Chicago where he lives, while walking with his 3 -year -old boy, Elliott, the narrator suddenly ceases to hear his voice and he no longer sees him. A black spot invades space. Suddenly Elliott reappears with Gabriel, the man who found him. In monotheistic religions Gabriel is the messenger of God, so maybe there is nothing to fear from Him but at the same time, growing uneasiness is being set up. Because Gabriel has the voice of the narrator’s father who, when he was a child, had disappeared without leaving any trace. It’s not the same voice, it’s his voice. Hyperacusia overlapping quasi-naturalness? Improbable chance? Iron of the supernatural? We won’t know and the propo tracks