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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Monthly supplement
Light on the underground
A quoi rêvent les loups (What Wolves Dream Of), Yasmina Khadra, Paris: Julliard 1999. pp274Into the abyss
Yasmina Khadra
All in the detail
Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, Pascale Ghazaleh,1750-1850, Cairo Papers in Social Science Volume 22, Number 3, Fall 1999. pp157A serious spinster
Passionate Nomad, Jane Fletcher Geneisse, London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. pp402Written by camera
Ayam Al-Dimoqratiya: Al-Nisa' Al-Misriyat wa Homoum Al-Watan (Days of Democracy: Egyptian Women and National Elections), Ateyyat El-Abnoudy, Cairo: Kassem Press, 1999. pp197Bizarre, perhaps
The Bazaar, Markets and Merchants of the Islamic World, Text by Walter M. Weiss and photographs by Kurt-Michael Westermann, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. pp256All about Egypt
Egypt: Nile, Desert, and People, Wolfgang and Rosel Jahn, Trans. by Manuela Kunkel and Ian Portman. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press 1999. pp191 + 300 colour illustrationsThrough the mask of Yasmine
Layali Okhra (Other Nights), Mohamed El-Bisatie, Beirut: Al-Aadab Publishing House, 2000. pp180Photohgraphs of Egypt and the Holy land, Francis Frith, Zeitouna Publishing, 1999 --see caption--
To the editor
At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-Wardani* Hikmet Al-Missriyeen (The Wisdom of Egyptians), introduced and edited by Mohamed El-Sayed Said, Cairo: The Cairo Centre for Human Rights, 1999. pp273
* Ashr Sanawat maa Farouq (Ten Years with Farouq), Karim Thabit, Cairo: Al-Shorouq, 2000. pp472 (Adel Hammouda and Me), Ahmed Fouad Negm, Cairo: Zeinab Publishing House, 2000. pp108
* Mirayat Al-Dhat Al-Okhra (Mirror of the Other Self), Sabri Hafiz, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, Aswat Adabiya Series, 1999. pp365
* Moqarabat Al-Abad (Nearing Eternity), Gamal El-Ghitani, Cairo: Nahdit Misr Publications, 2000. pp96
* Al-Kotob: Wighat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), monthly magazine, issue no. 13, February 2000 Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publication
* Al-Fonoun Al-Sha'biya (The Folk Arts), a specialised periodical, issue no.58-9, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation
* Al-Osour Al-Jadida (New Eras), monthly magazine, issue no. 5, February 2000, Cairo: Sinai Publishing House
* Nizwa, quarterly magazine, issue no.11, Oman: The Oman Institution for Journalism, Publication and Mass Communication
* Al-Hilal, monthly magazine, issue no. 2, February 2000, Cairo: Al-Hilal Publishing House
Books is a monthly supplement of Al-Ahram Weekly appearing every second Thursday of the month. We welcome contributions and letters on subjects raised in this supplement. Material may be edited for length and clarity; and should be addressed to Mona Anis, Books Editor, Al-Ahram Weekly, Galaa St., Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt; Faz: +202 578 6089; E-mail: m.anis@ahram.org.eg
For advertising call +202-5780233; Fax +202 394 1866To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
The perfect set for a roman noir?: The contemporary nature of post independence Algeria - an independence won at an appalling cost in the face of vicious French attempts to retain control - is further explored in Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra's latest novel, already a bestseller in France.
The French army in confrontation with demonstrators for Algerian independence, 1960
(Magnum Photos)
A quoi rêvent les loups (What Wolves Dream Of), Yasmina Khadra, Paris: Julliard 1999. pp274Light on the underground
Reviewed by David Tresilian
That a certain mystery is attached as much to the author as it is to the matter of "Yasmina Khadra's" books has surely done them no harm and has even, so it is said, protected the life of their author. The pseudonym of a man who writes as a woman for a francophone public from Algiers, Khadra's latest novel A quoi rêvent les loups (What Wolves Dream Of) has many of the features of his (or her) previous and very successful attempts at presenting events in contemporary Algeria as the stuff of a roman policier or roman noir. In his latest work, however, Khadra has had to dispense with the ruminative, slightly intellectual, disillusioned but still active police commissioner Brahim Llob of his previous novels. Llob, a sort of Algerian Inspector Morse who shared some of the characteristics of the Oxford-based detective, was retired in L'Automne des chimères (Autumn of Fantasies) on the orders of a high functionary in the regime -- a nice twist this -- who had apparently read one of "Yasmina Khadra's" reports on his cases and had been appalled at the way in which Algerian affairs were being presented to the French public. This was not before Khadra had discovered the possibilities of the Algerian detective story however, a form now being exploited by others, most notably by Boualem Sansal in his recent Le Serment des barbares (The Barbarians' Oath), a novel which has won several prizes in France but has gone unrecognised in the author's native Algeria. That Llob does not star in A quoi rêvent les loups will no doubt disappoint some. But there is still plenty of interest to be going on with, not least in the author's exploitation of le roman noir and in the penetrating regard that the novel casts on the on-going crisis in Algeria.
Khadra's earlier decision to present Algerian events within the frame of detective fiction was a happy one. A notoriously demanding form, and one that has a pleasingly intellectual and alienated character, it is an ideal vehicle for its author's bleak and uncompromising vision of things. A small-time functionary in the Algiers police department, squeezed between the country's ruling "politico-financial mafia" on the one hand and the armed Islamist groups on the other, Llob is an outraged witness to the excess and corruption of the one and the violence of the other. Between the two, he thinks, there is precious little room for manoeuvre, and one of the most striking formal features of the Commissioner Llob series (which includes Morituri (1997), Double Blanc (1997) and L'Automne des chimères (1998), as well as Le dingue au bistouri [Crazy Guy with a Knife] (1999)) is the author's blank juxtaposition of the country's beau monde, walled up in their villas and unconcerned by the war raging outside, and the squalor and hopelessness of life in the bidonvilles a few miles away.
Llob, who moves between these worlds by virtue of his professional affiliation, following the scent of crime from beau monde to bidonville something in the manner of Sherlock Holmes' peregrinations from Baker Street to the opium dens of the East India docks, casts a bitter, despairing eye on both. Patronised in the one, and in fear of his life in the other on the double charge of being both agent of the state and intello, his alienated commentary on what he finds reveals the character of the roman noir as a synoptic form with a heavy sociological charge. One had always known this to be the case in a sense, given the classical work in the genre by Raymond Chandler, whose detective, Philip Marlowe, had cast his own cynical regard on the criminal doings of mid-century America. But it is interesting to note the transplantation of this characteristic Euro-American industrial form to the somewhat differently organised space of late-century Algeria. And in this sense, Khadra's Commissioner Llob series is a fascinating example of the dissemination and creative re-application of literary forms.
A quoi rêvent les loups, however, is a more ambitious novel than any in the Llob series. Perhaps Khadra had begun to feel that the formulae of detective fiction were too constraining. Or he may have begun to tire of Llob and of the detective's continuous "interior monologue". Never as hard-boiled as are the private detectives of American noir -- this may have something to do with Khadra's exploitation of the police novel as a feminine form -- as a formal device the Commissioner nevertheless precluded the introduction of other voices and had the effect of giving actions and events a harsh, external glare. Khadra has tried to do something about this in the new novel by writing a more discursive novel in traditional third-person form. The great advantage of this is that it allows the author to concentrate in a deeper and more satisfying way on his subject, which is the moral psychology of a young man involved in Islamist terror.
Nafa Walid, the novel's protagonist, is a young man with good looks, a plausible manner and enough talent to stand a chance of making it as an actor. While he pursues his dream, and as a route out of the bled (the poor quarter of the city from which he comes), he takes a job as a chauffeur with a rich family. Very soon, and despite his efforts to keep clear of the messy affairs of his employers, he finds himself implicated in a nasty murder, subsequently losing his pay-off in an attempt to fix an interview with un monstre du casting (a big-time talent scout) with a line to French and international film. It is the epoch of the two-a-penny guru, "everyone discovering their vocation, young imams tracking down resentments". And by the end of the novel Walid is asking himself how it is that he now finds himself occupied in the trademark violence of the Algerian crisis, cutting the throats of villagers in a bid to terrorise the countryside and, in the towns, lying in wait for francophones, intellectuals and state employees, ready to cut them down "one after the other on their doorsteps".
Khadra does not propose an answer to this question, though he does pay considerable attention to the path along which Walid has travelled on his way to asking it. As we might expect, given the emphasis of Khadra's previous work, A quoi rêvent les loups invites the reader to take Algeria as a system or as collage, sometimes revealing the mechanism that articulates the different bits, sometimes proposing unsuspected lines of connection between lives lived in the rich suburbs and those lived in Bab El-Oued. There are "wolves" in both parts of town.
With a clutch of highly individual detective novels behind him, most of them featuring the lugubrious Llob and his assistant Lino, and now the author of an ambitious analysis of the present crisis in Algeria, "Yasmina Khadra" has established himself as one of the more interesting contemporary literary voices to have come out of the country. The speculation surrounding his identity is likely to continue, some claiming that Khadra is himself a highly-placed functionary in the regime, others rejecting the "mystery" surrounding the author's identity as a marketing ploy designed to pique the curiosity of readers and publishers. In a recent interview Khadra gave from Algiers to France-Inter (a sort of French BBC), while he was introduced as a woman, it was certainly a man's voice that spoke. However aside from such questions and without making too much of the author's formal and analytic ambitions, strong those these are, in A quoi rêvent les loups Khadra has written another novel that is ideal for a long train journey, and one that will serve as a gripping read on the metro.
