The 1988 October Riots in Algeria are recalled as a precise landmark in the narrator’s affair with A, but they resist becoming a simple date attached to the writing that follows. Their place in her memory shows how passion can make historical time vivid while leaving the time of composition indistinct. The riots also belong to a wider contrast in the narrative between events that can be located in a shared public chronology and experiences whose meaning remains intensely private.

The riots as a marker of lived time

The narrator says she can clearly recall the October riots in Algeria as part of the period of her relationship with A. Alongside them, she remembers the heat and hazy sky on 14 July 1989 and an ordinary purchase: a blender acquired in June, the day before she and A were due to meet. Public history, weather, domestic errands, and the anticipation of an appointment coexist in one unusually sharp recollection. The riots do not receive a separate account of their causes or course; their significance here is as a date-bearing event within the narrator’s intimate chronology.

The different times of passion and writing

About two months after A’s departure, the narrator began writing that she had done nothing but wait for a man since the previous September, though she could not remember the exact day she started. The contrast is telling: the events of the affair remain sharply placed, but she cannot attach any particular page to a rainstorm or to events in the world over the ensuing five months, including the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. In her account, living through passion and writing about it produce fundamentally different perceptions of time. The riots belong to the former: remembered with precision as part of the lived relationship, not as a timestamp for the later act of composition.

Historical events and private memory

The riots’ brief appearance helps establish the book’s method of placing intimate experience beside public history without turning either into an explanation of the other. A political event can register clearly in memory even when the narrator’s attention is organized around waiting, desire, and meetings; later, the world’s major events may remain impossible to connect to the pages she is producing. The resulting contrast is not that public history is absent, but that it does not provide a ready-made measure for the personal past.

A separate historical layer emerges when, during her grief after A’s departure, the narrator returns to the Passage Cardinet, where she had undergone a clandestine abortion twenty years earlier. She asks a grocer for directions, finds the partly erased street plaque, enters the building through a door without a digital code, and sees that the former resident who accompanied her to the station has died or moved into a suburban care home. The neighborhood has changed, but recognizing the street and recalling the woman’s protective escort makes the past bodily and particular. The visit does not cancel her present grief; she is nevertheless glad to have revived an earlier experience of violation, also caused by a man. This episode is distinct from the Algerian riots, but its juxtaposition clarifies the narrative’s broader concern with how public chronology, private memory, and writing register different forms of time.