The Return of the Forbidden: Le Soupçon Ordinaire by Alain Berenboom

Le Soupçon Ordinaire by Alain Berenboom appears at a particularly unsettling moment. As the Jewish community in Belgium increasingly wonders whether a future in the country is still possible amid rising antisemitism, Berenboom publishes a novel centered precisely on that feeling: the creeping realization that suspicion is becoming normal again. What makes the book so disturbing is that the dystopia it describes no longer feels entirely fictional.

Le Soupçon Ordinaire is not merely a dystopian novel. It is a mirror held up to Europe and its oldest reflexes, wrapped in irony, bureaucracy, and quiet fear. What makes the novel so unsettling is not violence or spectacle, but normality itself. Suspicion becomes “ordinary” because the mechanisms of exclusion no longer appear exceptional. They become administrative, polite, procedural — and therefore far more dangerous.

The novel opens with what appears to be a routine identity check outside the fur shop of Max Weingarten, a middle-aged Brussels furrier whose life revolves around routine, commerce, and discretion. But very quickly, the scene descends into absurdity. The police are not interested in crime, but in identity, ancestry, names, symbols, and hidden affiliations. Max himself barely understands what he is being accused of. He does not practice Judaism, knows almost nothing about Judaism, and has spent his entire life avoiding ideology. Yet the mere possibility of Jewish ancestry is enough to make him suspicious.

This is where Berenboom’s genius lies. He does not construct a classic totalitarian state with marching boots and theatrical tyranny. Instead, he imagines a future Europe in which Judaism has officially been abolished after decades of global conflict surrounding Israel and the Middle East. The justification sounds chillingly familiar: social peace, public harmony, and the elimination of division. The logic becomes terrifying precisely because it presents itself as humanitarian. “Without Jews, there is no antisemitism” becomes the grotesque conclusion of supposedly enlightened policymakers.

Berenboom perfectly understands that modern persecution rarely presents itself as hatred. It presents itself as regulation.

The power of the novel lies in the way bureaucratic absurdity slowly suffocates reality. The “Code of Liberties” — a paradoxical legal framework supposedly designed to protect equality — ultimately criminalizes memory, identity, and even ambiguity itself. Citizens destroy books to avoid accusations of discrimination. Police investigate surnames. Symbols become suspicious. Even literature becomes dangerous. Max casually admits that he threw away Voltaire, Dickens, Philip Roth, and even the Bible in order to comply with new sensitivities.

The irony is devastating: a society obsessed with tolerance eventually becomes intolerant of memory itself.

Stylistically, the novel moves somewhere between Kafka and Philip Roth, with a deeply Orwellian undertone rooted in specifically Belgian absurdity. Brussels becomes the perfect setting for this administrative dystopia: multilingual, bureaucratic, outwardly civilized, yet deeply anxious underneath. The authorities are not monsters. They are civil servants, inspectors, accountants, and polite police officers simply following procedures. That is precisely what makes the story believable.

Berenboom also explores a deeper philosophical question: what remains of Jewish identity once religion disappears? Throughout the novel, Judaism survives less as theology than as memory, culture, irony, family trauma, and historical reflex. Characters debate whether one can remain Jewish without faith, without rituals, even without wanting to be Jewish at all. The protagonist desperately rejects the label imposed upon him, while simultaneously being pulled back into that history through family secrets, hidden archives, and inherited fears.

This ambiguity gives the novel remarkable intellectual depth. Judaism here is not merely a religion; it becomes a metaphor for all inherited identities that modern societies simultaneously seek to erase and obsessively monitor.

One of the novel’s strongest themes is memory. Anne Frank, Kafka, hidden synagogues, forgotten cemeteries, closed museums — Berenboom portrays a Europe attempting to erase Jewish presence while remaining haunted by it. The past refuses to disappear. The more authorities try to suppress memory, the stronger it returns as a ghost. The result is a society trapped between oblivion and obsession.

Humor also plays an essential role. Dark, Jewish, distinctly Belgian humor runs throughout the novel. Without it, the book would become unbearable. The characters joke about catastrophe because irony becomes the last refuge against administrative dehumanization. Even during interrogations, humor survives. And that survival itself becomes almost a form of resistance.

What makes Le Soupçon Ordinaire especially relevant today is that its dystopia never feels distant. The novel speaks directly to contemporary anxieties surrounding surveillance, digital identity, ideological conformity, and the transformation of social suspicion into institutional procedure. Berenboom asks a profoundly modern question: in a world governed by databases, archives, social conformity, and permanent visibility, is it still possible to disappear into anonymity?

Max Weingarten desperately tries to remain an ordinary man. That is precisely his tragedy. The state, however, no longer accepts that anyone can simply remain “ordinary.”

Ultimately, Le Soupçon Ordinaire is less about Jews than about Europe itself — about a civilization convinced of its own tolerance while quietly rebuilding the mechanisms of exclusion under new names and morally elevated slogans. Berenboom reminds readers that persecution rarely begins with brutality. It begins with classification. With files. With forms. With supposedly reasonable questions.

And once suspicion becomes ordinary, freedom quietly disappears.

Alain Berenboom has written one of the most intelligent and unsettling Francophone dystopian novels of recent years. It deserves to be read not only as fiction, but as a warning.