The plot of Katherine Gregor’s translation of Cécile Tlili’s Just a Little Dinner unfolds in an apartment in Paris at the end of August. It follows the dramas of two couples at a dinner party organized by Étienne, who hopes to strike a business deal with his guest, Johar. As he plots how to best appear culturally impressive, his girlfriend Claudia anxiously cooks curry and courgette flowers. She sees no agreeable outcome to this dinner. If she speaks, her guests will immediately realize she’s a bore. If she remains silent, they’ll immediately clock her as a self-effacing housewife. Johar’s husband, Remi, arrives first. He’s occupied with thoughts of his deteriorating relationship and longs for the company of his mistress. Johar arrives fifteen minutes late. She has just been offered a promotion to CEO, which she contemplates as they drink and dine. Mostly, she wants a cigarette and an out of this insufferable dinner party. The novel’s title becomes more ironic as the story unravels. Death and transformation fill the apartment’s space, making the scene much more than “just a little dinner.”
Although Tlili peers into all of her characters’ inner monologues, she devotes the most attention to Claudia and Johar, who serve as character foils for one another. Claudia is shy, skinny, and ashamed, whereas Johar is loud, curvy, and confident. Behind their differences, however, lies the painful similarity that they are trapped in female bodies subject to the violence of systems made for men. As a translator, Gregor skillfully traps Claudia and Johar within a linguistic male gaze that often disgusted me, proving how well Gregor conveys the gender dynamics at play in Tlili’s novel. Yet this disgust was effective and necessary; through Gregor’s objectifying language, I recognized the violent urgency of Claudia and Johar’s escape from the dinner party and the patriarchal lives they were trapped in.
Gregor’s language intentionally enacts violence on Claudia and Johar. She often refers to Johar and Claudia’s “buttocks” with adjectives such as “thick” (13) or “toned” (83). Gregor could have translated the word as “ass” or “butt,” to be more explicitly objectifying. In contrast, the word “buttocks” gives the illusion of propriety. This illusion is all the more sinister, a form of voyeurism that feigns artfulness and delicacy rather than directly announcing its malice.
Tlili, through Gregor’s linguistic choices, carefully crafts an uncomfortable atmosphere. When Johar thinks back to a walk with her boss, Carl, she notes “how grotesquely her heavy breasts were bobbing under her blouse” (41). Gregor makes the bobbing motion, often depicted sexually by male writers, deeply uncomfortable. Using words like “grotesque” and “heavy,” she reflects the self-inflicted critical gaze that women use to intercept and prepare themselves for the male gaze. The male gaze ensnares Johar: “They would size her up, trying to assess through her coffee-toned complexion, her hair—too stiff to be natural—and sometimes through the depth of her cleavage, the extent of her competence” (52). This sentence contains so many interjections I had to read it twice to recall where it began. Here, Gregor’s translation is reminiscent of the meandering style of Gaelic writing. The winding sentence also hints at the fragmentation and objectification of the female body. As my eyes trekked across the commas and dashes, I imagined a similarly winding journey that Johar’s male coworkers traveled as they attempted to look beyond her appearance.
As the story progresses, the stakes intensify so that Claudia and Johar feel they are on death row. After Étienne proposes the merger to Johar, she realizes men in higher positions use her as a pawn to serve their interests. Before responding to his proposal, she thinks, “Even those on death row are entitled to one last cigarette” (100). She feels sentenced by the choice she’ll have to make if she wants to continue being successful under the patriarchy. The cigarette represents a momentary reprieve, an escape from the apartment that gets more claustrophobic every chapter. Similarly, Claudia senses her death after suffering a miscarriage during the dinner. She doesn’t want to leave the bathroom where it happened, “scared that her own death is lurking behind the door” (110). She is also on death row. This baby was supposed to make Étienne love her again and save her relationship. The miscarriage killed this hope.
Yet death does not need to only imply destruction; it can also be restorative. Johar gets a phone call from her mother: her grandfather is dead. She reflects, “…the distance and the years had made her grandfather an abstraction. Oddly, his death seems to restore his flesh to him.” (115). Johar moved away from her home in Tunisia many years ago and tried her best to sever ties with her family that she viewed as sexist. Yet this death restores memories that seemed abstract. The call inspires her to reject the promotion or her “death sentence.” She rejects the idea that to be successful, she must work under the expectations of the patriarchy. Death row reveals new paths.
Following a parallel arc, Claudia ends things with Étienne. She heads to the hospital to “abandon her body to the doctor’s exploration and treatment…The thought of losing consciousness, of disappearing into the fog of artificial sleep reassures her agitated mind” (154). She will finally have a chance to escape the body that men so often subjugated. Claudia embraces her death sentence by killing her relationship. Claudia and Johar’s rejection of their previous paths restores their flesh. They leave the apartment as if being born again. They allow their grief to occupy their bodies. Claudia thinks, “I’ll accept this unexpected sadness, I’ll observe the strange void left in my body by this life I never realised took up so much space” (155). This line, written in italics, is the first moment of inner dialogue. The reader leaves Gregor’s uncomfortable and violent language and peers into Claudia’s thoughts, symbolic of the autonomy she has gained over her mind and body.
Reading Gregor’s translation, I thought of the violences a translator must enact on a work to create a new one. Although I did not read Tlili’s original French, I observed the “strange void” it occupied in its interpretation. Through deliberate, uncomfortable, and feminist translation choices, Gregor’s work restores the flesh of Tlili’s original work.
Cécile Tlili. Just a Little Dinner. Translated by Katherine Gregor. Foundry Editions, 2024.
Chloe Boccara studies Creative Writing, French, and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She translates from French and soon from Spanish as well.
Wonderful review! Thank you so much for your contribution to Reading in Translation.