Guerra’s novel alternates between continents
Published 2026-07-06 16.08
“Repatriation” by Ève Guerra
A sudden workplace accidentan unexpected message. Already on the first pages, it is clear that all life will be put on pause in Ève Guerra’s “Repatriation”. Student Annabella learns that her father has died. Her crisis management will first concern the repatriation itself: getting his body home to be buried in France, not in Cameroon where he worked and died. No one in the family can afford it, lawyers disappear, there are rumors of a girlfriend but is she to be trusted?
The novel was awarded the 2024 Prix Goncourt for best debut and it is hypnotically exciting in a way that the frame of the story itself does not quite reveal. It sounds cliché, but the very presence of death creates intensity, and so layer after layer of the truths and the life lived so far are revealed. The father who died seems to have been something of an adventurer, an expat with French roots constantly traveling for work on the African continent. The much-too-young Congolese mother disappears early, in life, but lingers in the novel. Of course. Because it is the story of relationships that manage to be unstable and stable at the same time, of itching in old wounds that coexist with completely everyday actions.
The term “repatriation” is used nowadays almost only to re-migration from Europe, ie the racist upsurge of our time, or the return of artifacts to the countries they were stolen from, usually the global south or poorer parts of Europe. Here “repatriation” is the return of a dead man’s body to his country of origin and relatives in Europe.
The characters in “Repatriation” move through the novel in slightly different, skewed ways. There is no psychologizing here, instead the characters are woven through a beautiful, poetic prose that does not hesitate to switch between places and times. As if it was life that wrote. A life that judges no one.
Lines are often cut in, which makes the text become like a chorus of simultaneous voices – an interesting way of portraying confusion or crisis. You could call it cinematic, but it’s not really like that. It is more as if the outside and inside of the psyche meet and pull apart, events and thoughts are mixed. Reading is disturbed and forced to slowness, which it also needs.
“Repatriation” has something original, what the novel portrays is “the global village” and its reverses. Rootlessness, restlessness, the late father’s hard life and the daughter’s somewhat sleepwalking. A history of both the African continent and the European one, written in a way that evokes longing away from the bookshelves.
Ulrika Stahre is editor and critic at Aftonbladet Kultur, responsible for art coverage.
NOVEL
» Repatriation
Eve Guerra
Trans. Lisa Marques Jagermark
The crane
