The Watchers

The renowned author of The Last Summer of Reason achieved his greatest acclaim for this elegant, chilling novel, winning France's prestigious Prix Mditerrane in 1991. The Watchers is a politically and morally resonant fable of malevolent bureaucracy, thoughtless fundamentalism, and the danger of sacrificing liberty in the name of patriotism.

With equal parts sensuous prose and passionate politics, The Watchers follows the fortunes of two men during one sweltering North African summer. Menouar Ziada, a veteran on the winning side of past wars, is living out a peaceful life and dreaming of a country home. Just down his suburban street, inventor Mahfoudh Lemdjad has developed a loom that he desperately wants to patent. Unfortunately, he soon finds himself caught in a Kafka-esque tangle of forms, passports, interviews, and clerks bent on thwarting his efforts. At the same time, Mahfoudh's mysterious project and odd hours dredge up old, suspicious instincts in Menouar and his fellow veterans, drawing them inexorably further into a labyrinth of blame and fear from which there's only one escape.Algerian author Tahar Djaout has become known as a journalist and political figure since his assassination in 1993 by an Islamic fundamentalist group for the effects of his "fearsome pen." During his life, Djaout was also regarded as one of Algeria's finest novelists and the spearhead of a renaissance in native North African (Maghrebi) arts and culture. With The Watchers, readers have an opportunity to experience this incisive writer at his finest-and, at a time when American civil liberties are constantly losing out to "national security" concerns, to contemplate the dark consequences of a culture of suspicion.

Praise for The Last Summer of Reason:

"An elegiac ode to literature and a furious protest against intolerance."-The New York Times Book Review

"A chilling cautionary tale."-Philadelphia Enquirer

Tahar Djaout, Algerian author of The Last Summer of Reason, was killed in 1993 at the age of 39 in an attack attributed to an Islamic fundamentalist group. The Watchers, the writer's second novel to be published in English, is a pensive, darkly humorous work about an inventor's quest to register his invention and an old rebel's final burst of paranoia. Working late at night, Mahfoudh Lemdjad draws up plans for a modernized loom; Menouar Ziada spots Lemdjad's lighted windows and suspects that he is plotting against the government. False accusations nearly sink Lemdjad, but the tables are unexpectedly turned at the novel's conclusion. Djaout's clotted prose makes for slow going, but his examination of the vagaries of power is illuminating. Trans. from the French by Marjolijn de Jager.
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Djaout, assassinated in his native Algeria by Islamic extremists in 1993, won the Prix Mediterranee for this tale of two intersecting lives. Menouar Ziada fought for the winning side in his nation's civil war, and as a result enjoys a relatively luxurious lifestyle. Mahfoud Lemjad, meanwhile, isn't a veteran and so lives in a cramped studio apartment, where he works day and night on his invention: a modified loom. Mired in a swamp of passport and patent applications, Mahfoud perseveres through interminable bureaucracy and wins a prize at an international invention convention. The local government needs someone to blame for bungling Mahfoud's applications, and so the old soldier Menouar must make a final sacrifice for his inept, corrupt country. Mahfoud and Menouar find their societal roles reversed by a government that cares only for its own survival, serving and pleasing its citizens only when convenient. A furious and passionate indictment of injustice, misogyny, and everyday oppression, Djaout's defiant voice rings as true here as it did in The Last Summer of Reason [BKL O 15 01]. John Green
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