Leïla Slimani's "The Scent of Flowers at Night" — Reviewed by Sophie van Well Groeneveld
I was meeting with a former professor for coffee in Berlin; at the time I was begrudged, attributing my lack of focus to the hyperstimulation and the pace of New York with endless opportunities to go out and do something, anything.
“How do your friends who are writers in New York do it? That is, get themselves to write?”
“They’re like cats,” he said. “They pop their head out the window, you might see them at an event, and then you don’t see them for a while.”
Leïla Slimani agrees: “The first rule when you are trying to write a novel is to say no. No, I won’t meet up for a drink. No, I can’t look after my sick nephew. No, I’m not free for lunch, for an interview. No, I can’t go for a walk to see a film. You have to say no so often that the offers become rarer, the telephone stops ringing, that you start to regret the fact that all your emails are adverts. You have to say no so often that people think you’re an arrogant misanthrope, a pathological loner” (The Scent of Flowers at Night, Coronet, 2023).
I’ve been trying to adopt cat strategy for a year.
The burdensome task of forcing oneself to write latches the reader into Slimani’s internal conflicts: “To write you must refuse yourself to others; refuse them your presence, your love.” She speaks of her desire at times to be sick, envying her friend who broke his leg and finally had an excuse to write his book. This sharp, harsh voice veering on melodramatic seeds Slimani’s reflection on why she writes and how the continuing pursuit of writing informs her life. Her instinctual natural mode is one of moving; her editor describes it as frenetic. Grappling with the push and pull between her movement between places (leaving Rabat for Paris; she now lives in Lisbon) and the stillness that writing requires, being locked away indoors—these experiences help bridge her confrontations of past and present.
This is Slimani’s second nonfiction work after Sex and Lies, a collection of essays on the lives of women grappling with sexual politics instigated by conversations she was having with readers following the book tours for her novels Adèle and Lullaby in Morocco. Her most recent works are the first two novels in a historical fiction trilogy loosely based on her family’s history and Franco-Moroccan ancestry. Her first novel The Country of Others is based on her Catholic grandmother from Alsace, France and her grandfather from Morocco during the country’s decolonisation in the 1950s. The second follows her parents' lives in postcolonial Rabat.
The Scent of Flowers at Night is a refreshing, genuine meditation on writing without geographical anchorage. Slimani literally and figuratively guides the reader, as she tours a museum overnight, through her invocation to write—through memories of childhood, Rabat, her relation to her past and present, and her father’s late suffering. Following Slimani’s entry rumination on saying no, the reader shortly learns Slimani has not followed her own advice while working on a novel and made two consecutive failed attempts at saying no, leading to an impending solo night in Venice at the Punta della Dogana Museum. In Venice, before embarking for her night at the museum, she nourishes herself with food, worried about being hungry during her sleepover. She goes overboard with the dishes and finds herself overly full on Milanese veal. What is a trip without soiling one day from trying to embrace the local delicacies and feeling sick? At the museum, Slimani is initially agitated, distracted as she writes about craving a cigarette (she attempts to manage the habit via smoking a cigarette into the toilet bowl) and always being cold. The writing leans gluttonous with Slimani’s vivid depictions of her bodily state and cravings, sensorial with a feeling of needing something or having too much of it. This serves as a lulling coy before Slimani swerves to past memories instigated by the art she is cocooned amongst.
Once Slimani has overcome the reality of agreeing to lock herself in the museum for the night—alone, bar the security guard—the artwork of Felix Gonazales Torres, Roni Horn and Feli Gonazales spurs memories of friendships and reminds her of a character in one of her novels. Saying no means getting the novel done, but sometimes saying yes gets the mind moving. She references Tolstoy's response to his editor’s inquiry over the lack of pages: “Anna Karenina has left. I am waiting for her to return.” I read this and tell myself, if the novel is not in the room, then do I need to be? Yes writing requires discipline; diligently tending to the desk and the page daily until something comes. But I still find it hard not to tend to the world, and it’s not an either/or.
One installation makes Slimani think of the plant that grew near the front door of her childhood home, the one her father loved the smell of: night-blooming jasmine. This imbues her with recollections. Slimani has a penchant for nighttime. It's a time for unexpected behavior, guards, and falsities down—in other words, movement, escape, truth. In these dreams of reinvention and vengeance she references Frantz Fanon: “the colonized self is always freeing himself between nine at night and six in the morning.”
The visual evocation of a scent of her childhood brings Slimani to her father, whose later life was fundamental to her becoming a writer. A former bank president, he was falsely implicated in a political financial scandal leading to his incarceration for a few months late in his life. He died shortly after his release in 2004. Years later he was exonerated of the charges. Slimani writes to avenge her father, to give him new landscapes, to save him by giving him a second chance.
Writing excommunicates Slimani from the world. She writes of her childhood where she felt equipped against movement like an indoor cat: “I never played any sport. I can’t ride a bicycle, and I do not have a driving license.” Her move to Paris at age eighteen increased her sense of placelessness. She was perceived as too western in Morocco, and always had to answer to the question of her origins in France. Writing only deepens her feeling unrooted, for as Salman Rushdie (one of the people the book is dedicated to) says, it is “tearing yourself away from a culture.”
The setting of a museum and the stimuli of art is not the only guide for Slimani’s musings on writing without geographical anchorage. So is the city of Venice—symbolic as a place without land, with salt as a resource, and with historic wealth that comes from abroad. She writes of the memories cities hold; perhaps the stones of the buildings unearth her memories like the art does. She says, “The purpose of literature is not to restore reality but to fill emptiness.” The emptiness of being between places, the emptiness of loss.
Leïla Slimani writes forthcomingly about her mental avoidance via cravings, distractions, and general antsiness in The Scent of Flowers at Night. She plainly confesses to what might otherwise be whispered: unabashed statements on refusing others' love in order to write, posing the question of choosing between her father’s survival and her own writing. Slimani’s writing on being a writer is refreshing and unromanticized. I’m left believing I can get closer to being like a cat, alone but in the company of writers through their books.