Everyday Belonging : Bertrand de Robillard’s L’Homme qui penche and Une interminable distraction au monde

Drawing on metropolitan theories of le quotidien, this chapter investigates Robillard’s Franco-Mauritian protagonists’ thwarted quests to find a place of belonging within the shared, public spaces of Mauritius and of Paris. It then plots their ultimate reconciliation with the mundane, everyday place of ‘home’ by means of strategic ‘pratiques de l’espace’ (Certeau) and through writing. In their focus on the minutiae of everyday life, Robillard’s unjustly neglected novels confound critical expectations of the nature of ‘post-colonial’ literature. Nonetheless, I argue, his novels could also be seen to depict Mauritius as a place in which only white, male, middle-class individuals have the luxury of entertaining such purportedly ‘everyday’ forms of belonging.