I think about it several days later but don’t dare bring it up. I get a telephone call, so we don’t finish the conversation. Or else she makes a joke or quotes some complicated philosophical saying that I can’t figure out. When she’s not hedging, she doesn’t answer at all. She hedges, as she often does when I ask her something. I ask her if I can write about her, explaining that it’s important to me that I have her consent. I scribble bits of sentences about all the women I compare to her, all the women I can’t love. “Since meeting Nina, I’ve written every day. More notably one of her most distinct wishes, while reticent, is to not be written about. Nina is more of a device throughout her hook-ups, used as a reflection of Fatima’s own desires Cassandra is younger, Ingrid is more demanding, Gabrielle can’t capture her attention the same way. The other dozen or so pages in which she is referenced are comparisons, wishes, and fleeting thoughts of desire within Daas. Nina Gonzales takes up all of nine pages within the novel. It is also, despite its advertising, not a love story. It states without effectively creating resonance, and moments of action and character movement are compelling, but so sparse between pages that it becomes difficult to find any forward momentum. While her flat tone is a distinct voice, it becomes forward to the point of being disjointed. However, Daas’s fragmented prose is originally well done but overly present. The portrayal of the name Fatima as something that binds, a woman’s identity being inherited, is able to bring some of the fragments of chapters together. The dynamics of Islam and how her name has been inherited are very compelling within her prose. With this piece of autofiction she reaffirms both her identity as a lesbian and as a muslim together, and chronicles her shifting understandings of her family and her own future as a writer.ĭaas reintroduces herself on nearly every page, expanding on her name itself throughout the book and it’s holiness in comparison to what she sees as her sins. Daas has gained a large amount of attention and acclaim within France due to her propensity towards writing taboo in all its forms, including blurring the lines between ethical inclusion and what is honest in literature. Originally titled La Petite Dernière, this translation by Lara Vergnaud is the English launch of a debut author in the French literary scene. The Last One by Fatima Daas is an ambitious work of autofiction, covering a young woman’s adolescence with chronic asthma and her development both as a practicing muslim and a lesbian in the suburbs of Paris.
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