L’Aîné des orphelins received mixed critical reviews, fueled by the ambivalence of the novel itself and of its narrator. The plurality of interpretations, sometimes contradictory, allowed by the novel reveals a poetics of « distraction », in the etymological sense of « pulling in various directions ». Indeed, with its effects of delay and digressions and the wealth of symbolic – sometimes paradoxical – interpretations which it makes possible, the novel and its main character afford to light, beyond the very history of the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, the deep complexity of a phenomenon like genocide which still resists full and conscious understanding.