All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui

In the past week or so I’ve picked up three books I’d previously DNFed in the hopes that I would like them better now…turns out instead that I shouldn’t have given them a second chance and that instead, I should have just trusted my gut-instinct. Lesson learned.

All Men Want to Know is an incredibly affected and stylised memoir that doesn’t ring particularly true to life. The author and narrator of All Men Want to Know is very much into navel-gazing and has a penchant for making edgy comments. The few ‘characters’ who are given lines of dialogue do not sound like particularly believable individuals, rather they sounded like the narrator masquerading as different people. They use the same type of metaphorical and flashy language, and similarly to her have a propensity for making fake-deep statements about human nature, society, queerness etc.
The narrative is divided into sections called Remembering, Becoming, and Knowing. These last one or two pages and present us with what amounts to an underdeveloped and fragmented snapshot of the author’s life. This technique is sadly all the rage and if you enjoyed Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest you might actually be able to appreciate All Men Want to Know in a way that I was unable to. In the Remembering segments, Bouraoui writes about her childhood, specifically about growing up in Algeria to an Algerian father and a French mother. In Becoming and Knowing Bouraoui is living in Paris in the 80s and going to lesbian bars and clubs, unsure whether she actually wants to find someone or not. I should have found these sections somewhat relatable as they are seemingly intent on exploring her internalised homophobia but the way she articulates her anxieties, fears, and desires struck me as laboured and showy.
Nothing about her childhood or her time in Paris is rendered clearly to us. The studied language takes the centre-stage. Which would have been bearable if say her prose was anything like Ocean Vuong or Caleb Azumah Nelson. But her style just isn’t as lyrical and readable as theirs These impressionistic snapshots of her life left no lasting impressions on me as they failed to capture the scenes they were supposedly meant to capture. They begin randomly and end abruptly so that I was left wondering what function they served in the overall narrative. I also found the way the author writes about things such as sexual abuse and suicide to be tasteless and sensationalistic. She seemed more intent on using a certain type of language than on showing any sensitivity towards these topics. Much of the imagery included in this novel was clichéd (we have the classic scene featuring ‘blood’ on ‘sheets’). There was nothing subversive or thought-provoking about this memoir. I found myself disliking Bouraoui and I was vexed in particular by her endless self-dramatizing. Her queer friends all blur together, they are given barely any lines and serve the role of filler. We don’t really gain any insight into Bouraoui’s family dynamics nor are her mother or father particularly fleshed out. Bouraoui also has the habit of speaking on behalf of other characters, so that she will write about the thoughts and feelings someone else is allegedly experiencing as if these are true (rather than her speculations). Although this book is desperately trying to be sensual and deep, it is neither of these things. I found it boring, unconvincing, and sensationalistic. The best thing about this book is the cover. A truly banal excuse of a book.

my rating: ★★☆☆☆

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