This is the third volume in the "Algerian Quartet." As in the other novels, fiction and history blend here, aided by the form that lies between them: autobiography. The memory of a love affair, accounts of the narrator's family history, the experience of making a film about Algerian women, the story of a sixteenth-century traveler, the death of an Algerian journalist--Djebar unites everything through her smoothly unfolding language, weaving a tapestry that clarifies if you stand back to see it whole. I still prefer Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (L'Amour, la fantasia), the first volume of the quartet, because it's more raw and insistent about the issues that interest Djebar, but I do recommend this one. Sample sentence: "I wandered, with this mark on my heart, seeking along the slopes of this boulevard, in the mists of this espaliered city, some ghost..."
Good. A lot of layers, a lot of things going on. It's hard to describe this book in a few short sentences. I give it 3 stars because I feel like Djebar was reaching for two many things in one book. I read this for a Post-Modernism class. To me there were a lot of interesting points about the book, decontructing a woman's role in her marriage in her community in her career in her history--in her own skin. I read an english translation from the original french while in Paris, seeing the tensions between Algerians and the French... I think those little details made her writing seem a bit more complex as well. All in all a good book.
Do You like book So Vast The Prison (2001)?
Djebar is an Algerian woman writer, probably the most notable among Francophone authors. This book is her most autobiographic account, weaving her life stories with generations of women who have come before her. And the recuperation of the Berber language, as it has been protected and passed down by women from the time before Common Era. Her writing is poetic, strong, critical (of the violence in the 90s in Algeria), and compassionate, as she attempts to re-write the histories of Algeria to recognize the women who've been silenced.
—Amanda
