Synopsis
When a group of Westerners arrives to "liberate" them from their primitive state, the people in the village of Zitouna in Algeria watch in horror amd disbelief as one of their own joins the imperialist invaders
Reviews
Some years after the Algerian revolution of the early '60s, a poor village--perhaps to expiate past sins--slides into modernity and ruin, compelled by the vengeful assault of an alienated former inhabitant. Omar El Mabrouk, appointed prefect by the central administration, arrives in the village of his birth one day seething with a pestilent resentment, blaspheming Islam and hurling promises of wealth and ease in the tone of malevolent insults. A distant and apparently indifferent bureaucracy fosters his cyclonic energy, and from the outset it is clear that the hamlet will not survive. This disturbing tale is much deepened by the manner of its telling. A silent and anonymous interviewer records the recollections of an equally anonymous old man, one of the "few survivors among us," whose narrative, twining history with fable, dips forward, backward, and into itself with the ease of authentic oral tradition. The Algerian author, whose previous books have been published in French, presents the evils, hypocrisies and sexual mores of the doomed village--and their resonance throughout conservative Islam--with no more than the merest breath of irony, and never allows us to find these values, or the community holding them, merely quaint.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The pious, minuscule, barely noticeable Algerian village of Zitouna, home to not much more than groves of eucalyptus and histories of one group subjugating another (first local bandits named the Roumis, then the French colonizers), finds its existence threatened when one of its own black sheep--a bureaucrat with a shady past, Omar el Mabrouk--is reassigned by the central government in Algiers to become a provincial prefect. Out of spite and megalomania, he decides to make Zitouna the provincial seat--a modernization that first involves ripping out most of the eucalyptus (foreign contractors do this work; the villagers first think they are dwarves, so elfin are they against the scale of their enormous earth-moving machinery) and installing instead all the soulless buildings, the licentiousness, and the cynicism that the village up until then has avoided. Mimouni, an Algiers-based novelist, has a light touch and a taste for the comic grotesque--the foulmouthed and vengeful el Mabrouk is an entertaining cartoon--but beneath the folk-tale style lies a good taste of what the traditionalists and fundamentalists are making so successful a fuss over in Algeria at the moment. Intriguing. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This is a morality tale about the death and ultimate rebirth of an ancient civilization. Told from the viewpoint of an old man, it concerns a remote village in Algeria rocked by the efforts of "civilized" Westerners to modernize it. In this new world, people cast as social lepers ally themselves with the powerful and make lepers of others even weaker than themselves. Eventually, some villagers even trade their silver-embroidered saddles and handmade weapons for state-of-the-art percolators and "apparatuses that make you laugh and cry" (televisions). Hope arrives, however, in the unlikely form of a young magistrate--the son of the most powerful villager--who has become Westernized and joins gleefully in the corruption of his native land. By teaching the villagers that "victory belongs to the more resolute and not the more powerful," he offers them a guidepost to the future. Readers of this affecting story will readily empathize with the villagers' quest to maintain their way of life and will question the current emphasis on technology as a panacea for all social ills. For literary collections.
- Peggy Partello, Keene State Coll., N.H.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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