Lovers Of Algeria - Hardcover

Anouar Benmalek

3.82

253 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860468683 ISBN 13: 9781860468681

Publisher: SOS Free Stock, 2001

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A Swiss woman, Anna, walks the paths of a cemetery in present-day Algiers. She is searching for two names, those of her children, murdered more than 40 years previously by the FLN, the organization that fought for Algerian independence from the French in the early 1960s and whose leaders were convinced that the children's father, Nassreddine, was a traitor to their cause. Anna has returned to an Algeria rife with terrorism and the excesses of fundamentalism. "The devil has entered our country, and his footprints are everywhere," her friend Majid tells her as she sets out, undaunted, disguised in Muslim dress, on a perilous quest to find out whether the man she once loved is still alive. She is guided through the harsh and beautiful landscape by Jallal, a boy who sells peanuts in the Place des Martyrs. Captured by the militant "forces of Allah", the woman and boy must witness and endure all manner of brutality and degradation before Anna's and Nassreddine's destinies can finally converge. Anouar Benmalek's courageous novel confronts the tragedy of Algeria, its immediate past and present, as no other writer has done since Albert Camus, and in the process he tells a love story of immense tenderness.

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About the Author:

Anouar Benmalek was born in Casablanca in 1956 and now lives in France. After the 1988 riots in Algeria in protest of government policies, he became one of the founders of the Algerian Committee Against Torture.

From Publishers Weekly:

This captivating novel set in late 20th-century Algeria entwines the country's tumultuous politics with the personal histories of two lovers who found and lost each other amid the upheaval. Forty years after her twin children were killed by the FLN (Algerian Liberation Front), 65-year-old Anna leaves Switzerland for Algiers in search of her children's graves and her Arab first husband, Nassreddine. Attempting to disguise her European identity in a land rife with racism and terrorism, she dons traditional Arab dress and enlists the help of nine-year-old Jallal, a precocious, destitute street peddler. The unlikely couple ventures off into the mountains, but Nassreddine is living in Algiers, "the dirty, cruel capital which, in lieu of family, he has learned to love so dearly." Benmalek uses Anna's search for her husband, a spiritual pilgrimage in its own right, as a way of reaching into the past: he shows Anna as a disillusioned circus acrobat; Nassreddine imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and wrongly accused of everything from resistance fighting to cannibalism. Despite the violence, corruption and discord, however, Benmalek never denies Algiers its beauty—"magnificent beneath its blazing sun." Vivid language and striking metaphors bring the landscape to life, and temporal shifts establish a punishing distance between the characters as they search for one another. This book was a bestseller in France, where it was awarded the Prix Rahid. With a poetic but light-handed translation by Joanna Kilmartin, a more modest but admiring reception here should be expected.
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