Mansour's Eyes

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020

"Capitalism and religious fundamentalism collide in Girod’s shimmering account of one man’s heresy and imminent execution."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Mansour al-Jazaïri is on his way to his public execution. As his faithful friend Hussein looks on, the crowd calls for his head. Gassouh! Gassouh! It is a time when age-old rituals play out amid skyscrapers and are replayed on smartphone screens in the air-conditioned corridors of shopping malls. Set over the course of a single day in the Saudi Arabian capital, Mansour’s Eyes weaves together several historical pasts: the time of Mansour’s great-grandfather, the Emir Abdelkader; that of Algerian independence; and that of another Mansour, Mansur Al-Hallaj, a Sufi mystic executed in 922. In this lyrical and ambitious novel, Ryad Girod looks at the post-Arab Spring world as its drive toward modernity threatens to sever its relationship with the ethos of Sufi thought and mysticism.

Ryad Girod was born in 1970 in Algiers, where he teaches mathematics in the Lycée International d’Alger. He has also spent time as a teacher in Riyad and Paris, and has lived in Saudi Arabia, as well as Algeria, France, and Syria. Girod is a part of what the French press have labeled the October Generation, along with fellow writers such as Adlène Meddi, Samir Toumi and others who came of age around the time of the October Riots in 1988. This is his first book to appear in English.