"Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow" (by Faiza Guene)

In Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, nineteen-year-old author Faiza Guene introduces us to Doria, a Moroccan girl living with her mother in the projects near Paris, France. Her father ran out on them and back to their hometown in Morocco six months ago. Now Doria and her mother, Yasmina, who works as a maid in a hotel, are on their own, with a little help sent by the city and Doria's school.

That help includes show-off social worker Madame DuSomething (a name that lets people know she comes from people of high standing) and the psychiatrist, Madame Burlaud, who is old and ugly and smells like anti lice shampoo, according to Doria. Doria and her mother have friends, too. Hammoudi, a thug living in their apartment building, and Auntie Zorah, an Algerian immigrant, are just a few of the colorful cast of characters in this novel.

The phrase "kiffe kiffe tomorrow" is one of Doria's own invention, coming from the Arabic kif-kif, which means same old, same old, and the French verb kiffer, which means to really like something. At first, Doria's life is kif-kif tomorrow. Same old bad stuff tomorrow, same as every day. Same stuff to deal with: paying the rent on time, failing school, and the stuff every teenager deals with, like guys or embarrassment. Doria is a lot like every other teenage girl, but at the same time, she's much different. She's strong and she deals with everything as it comes along, no matter how hard it is.

The Paris that Doria inhabits is not the Paris of the movies, the Paris that Yasmina was expecting when she stepped off the boat and set foot in France all those years ago. It's not the same Paris that is just a few metro stops away. This Paris is full of people caught between two countries and, really, two entirely different worlds. In this novel, told in Doria's fresh, funny, original voice, the projects outside of Paris aren't just full of rap, soccer, and crime. She turns all the stereotypes about immigrants held by people like her mother's boss, Mr. Winner (who calls all the Arabs, like her mother, "Fatma"), upside down and shows them how wrong they are.

This is Faiza Guene's first book, and I'm hoping it won't be her last. She is only nineteen; it's admirable that she could finish writing a book at all. Many people, much older, couldn't do it even if they wanted to. The translation from French (Kiffe Kiffe Demain is the French title) is also brilliant. Although I haven't read the French text, it does not seem that Sarah Adams' translation is missing any of the brilliant wit or originality that was expected from reading reviews. Sometimes, a reader can tell he or she is missing something in a translation, the spark that made the book in its original language so popular. If this book is one of those, then the French version must have been unbelievably brilliant.

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow is a great insider's look not only at the public housing projects outside of Paris, but at the life of a teenage girl not so different from one anywhere else in the world. This book is especially great for anyone who has ever felt they aren't the same as everyone around them - anyone who has been, so to speak, on the outside looking in.

This novel had me daydreaming a little at first, but I was certainly absorbed once I got into it. Faiza Guene pulls you into her story. When you emerge, you'll find yourself missing Doria's fresh take on things. Doria is an amazing character, possibly a little like Faiza Guene herself, who also grew up in the projects outside of Paris. She has a brilliant imagination, and the story she has to tell is both funny and sad, lighthearted and serious. Her voice is cynical and hopeful at the same time, something that is difficult to achieve in writing.

This highly original story, told in an equally original voice, will be popular for as long as people read it. And read it they will, even if it's only because they'll be pulled in by the amazing cover art. It's sure to be a favorite with readers everywhere in France, the U.S., or anywhere else in the world, in rich suburbs, in the middle of cities, out in the country, or in the projects like Doria.

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Faïza Guèn’s slim but inspired first novel — already a hit in Europe — opens with a glossary. In it, we learn that the phrase “kif-kif” is Arabic for “same old, same old” or “it’s all the same.” The saying is also a refrain of the book’s charmingly sourpuss narrator, Doria, a 15-year-old Muslim girl living in a housing project outside Paris.

Doria has plenty of reasons to be bitter. Her father, frustrated by his wife’s failure to produce a son, has returned to Morocco in search of a new bride. To make ends meet, Doria’s illiterate mother, Yasmina, is reduced to cleaning rooms at a cheap motel where, in the words of her daughter, she flushes “the toilet after rich folks, all to be paid three times zero” and her supervisor never bothers to learn her real name. “It must really give Monsieur Winner a charge to call all the Arabs ‘Fatma,’ all the blacks ‘Mamadou’ and all the Chinese ‘Ping-Pong,’ ” Doria says in her caustic style. “Pretty freaking lame.” As Doria assesses the lives of her neighbors in the projects, she sees little evidence of success gained by means other than lottery tickets and crime.

Guène, who is of Algerian descent and wrote the book while still in her teens, knows her material. She grew up in a public housing project in Pantin, outside Paris. (The riots in France’s heavily Muslim suburbs last year are one reason the book got a lot of attention in the European press.)

But “Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow” is not just a political tract. What makes it appealing is its sharply drawn profile of a precocious adolescent. In Sarah Adams’s highly colloquial translation, the narrator’s scorn extends to areas unrelated to the sociocultural circumstances of her family. A state-appointed shrink smells like “anti-lice shampoo.” A classmate enlisted to help Doria with her homework is a “fat loser.” A social worker has a “scary voice, the kind of voice you can imagine saying: ‘I am Death! Follow me, it’s your time!’ ” In this way and others — her propensity to daydream about Hollywood stars, her obsession with acne and breast size, her aversion to all traces of phoniness or unctuousness in others — Doria is a typical teenager. Occasionally, her carping evokes Holden Caufield. “I’ve had enough of school,” she announces. “It gets on my nerves and I don’t talk to anybody. Really, there are only two people I can talk to for real anywhere.”

Guène’s slang expressions, paired with the use of the present tense, occasionally make “Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow” read more like a series of adolescent diary entries than a novel. Yet her dry wit elevates the book above juvenilia. “He’s always high and I think maybe that’s why I like him,” Doria says of a much-older, Rimbaud-spouting drug dealer on whom she harbors a secret crush. A family friend’s husband who spends half the year in Algeria with his second wife and the other half in France with his first, “knew how to hit the right balance, rein himself in. He does it part-time.” Riffing on the Arabic phrase “inshallah,” or “God willing,” Doria remarks, “But, thing is, you can’t ever know if God’s willing or not.” There are even hints of poetry. “Outside, it was gray like the color of our building’s concrete and it was drizzling in very fine drops, as if God were spitting on all of us,” Guène writes.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of “Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow” is its heroine’s voluminous knowledge of American popular culture, particularly the schlocky programs she and presumably millions of others watch on French TV, including “Wheel of Fortune,” “The Price Is Right,” “The Young and the Restless” and “Who’s the Boss?” Who knew Tony Danza had made it big in the City of Light? As Doria says: “If they cut off our TV like they did with the phone, it will be too much. It’s all I have.”

By the novel’s end, Doria has begun to see that reality has far more to offer her than any hokey set-up on her television screen: a new school; a new job for her mother; even a first boyfriend, who inspires the pun that informs the book’s title. According to the glossary, the French verb “kiffer” means, more or less, “to be really crazy about something.” As she begins to enjoy at least some elements of her existence, Doria’s refrain changes, too — from bitter to hopeful, and also from Arabic to French. It’s unclear whether this means she’s become better disposed toward France. Either way, as Doria stops lamenting and starts living, the reader can’t help cheering.