An intimate odyssey exploring the silences of the soul, the echoes of the past, and the power of our bonds
The novels Tant que je peux te dire je t’aime, Aux portes des étoiles and Les Méandres de l’Oubli form a three-volume literary saga centred on a bond as deep as it is fragile: the bond between a father and his son.
At the heart of this journey are Rayan and Salim. Two lives bound by filial love, but also by past wounds, silences, misunderstandings and secrets passed down from one generation to the next. The saga follows their path from rupture to forgiveness, from absence to transmission, from wounded memory to a form of light.
In Tant que je peux te dire je t’aime, the fracture is intimate. A long-buried childhood trauma causes a painful rupture between father and son. This first novel is the emotional core of the whole: it portrays the difficulty of expressing love when words arrive too late, and the fragile possibility of healing.
With Aux portes des étoiles, the saga broadens into a quest. After Rayan’s mysterious disappearance, Salim tries to understand what happened to him. Between Paris, Casablanca, Annecy, Gibraltar and Kyiv, he explores the uncertain borders between truth, memory and imagination. Searching for his father also becomes a search for himself.
In Les Méandres de l’Oubli, the cycle reaches its fulfilment. On a stormy night off the coast of AlmerÃa, two fishermen rescue a wounded man who has lost his memory. Around this stranger, an investigation unfolds between Sète, Spain, the Rif, Paris, Ukraine and the Sahel. Cross-border trafficking, old loyalties and buried secrets intersect with the intimate journey of Rayan and Salim. The final volume transforms the search for the father into a meditation on what remains when everything seems to have been swept away.
Across these three novels, Rida Lamrini explores what parents pass on to their children, deliberately or despite themselves: their wounds, their mistakes, their silences, but also their capacity to love, to transmit and to open a path towards the future.
One conviction runs through the whole saga: faced with human tragedy and the mistakes of the past, love and forgiveness cannot repair everything, but they can prevent people from disappearing entirely from one another’s lives.
Although deeply connected, the three novels can also be read independently. Together, they form a coherent saga driven by a single question:
What remains of us in the memory of those we have loved?
