A Bastille Day post: Tocqueville on France and Algeria

I somehow neglected this in my springtime frenzy of reading about the French-Algerian War, but its ringing words may be even more relevant in the waning moments of Bastille Day than than they were in April.

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I still don't know why France treated Algeria differently from Tunisia and Morocco, making of it a full-fledged colony while holding the others as protectorates. It couldn't really be because of a fly swatter, could it?

It transpires, though, that some of the impetus for France's decision about how to proceed after its invastion of Algiers came from the guy better known for writing about America:

"Tocqueville himself had sought such an incorporation when, in his 1847 report, he described the goal that would guide France's elusive, destructive, and ultimately failed project in Algeria:

"`We should set out to create not a colony properly speaking in Algeria, but rather the extension of France itself across the Mediterranean.'"

I don't say that makes him a perp, but he is at least a person of interest.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria is to France and Vietnam to the U.S. as ? is to ?

I'd decided to let Algeria lie for a while until a pair of passages in Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec made me realize Algeria must have penetrated the French consciousness and conscience the way Vietnam did in the United States.

The character in question (dead by the time the novel begins and invoked for his abominable conduct in the community and toward his family) is said to have had a bullet lodged in his head from the Algerian War, and to have been

"taken off active service and they put him into interrogations. Torturing people." 

Revelations of torture during the war shocked the French public, and the matter still comes up in occasional legal cases.  That Vargas could invoke torture and Algeria in a novel published in 2011 (English translation, 2013) suggests at least some in France are still haunted by the subject, and the character in Vargas' book said to have engaged in torture suggests that Vargas regards torture as the materialization of the worst that France has ever done and torturers as the real-life embodiment of the evil spirit always hinted at in her books.

If Algeria is France's conscience and its nightmare, if Vietnam played a similar role for the United States, what are their counterparts for other countries? And have those counterparts appeared in crime fiction?

*

(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

"That line belongs in a crime novel"

"`It is raining on the city.' The streetlights have been on for two hours, lighting up the closed shutters and doors of silent facades. The city is still and secluded, cunning, hostile, and frightened... 

"This was a calm day, a sad autumn day..."

That would be a good opening for a crime story, maybe a novel by Simenon or something out of Northern Ireland, or for a piece of urban post-apocalyptic fantasy. But it's neither. What it is is the opening of the Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun's journal of the French-Algerian war.  As if that opening is not ominous enough, Feraoun was murdered by the OAS three days before the cease-fire decreed by the French government under the accord that ended the war.

What kind of a story would you expect from a crime novel that began the way Feraoun began his journal?  What passages have you read outside of crime writing that would make good openings or descriptions in a crime novel?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

In France, as Cara Black said, it's complicated

I've reached a convenient temporary stopping point in my Franco-Algerian reading. Before I go, though, here are some thoughts I found today about the Algerian War's lingering effects in Algeria and France from a crime writer who sets her books in the latter.

The crime writer is Cara Black, author of the Aimée Leduc novels, and her post on the Murder is Everywhere blog begins "They killed our cook, threw her body down the well and stuck her head on the fence post."

Lest you think the post is all partisan wailing, its title is "In France it's Complicated."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The Day of the Jackal and the Continental Op

So, what does my recent Algeria obsession, in the form of having just read Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, have to do with crime fiction, anyhow?

For one thing, it reinforces how strongly Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal, for all its thriller trappings, is really a police procedural that has marked affinities with hard-boiled P.I. stories as well (No wonder it won the best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972).

The villains of Forsyth's classic 1971 novel are the leaders of the OAS, the breakaway paramilitary organization that, enraged by French President Charles de Gaulle's concessions to Algeria, hires a hit man known as the Jackal to kill him. The OAS were (and perhaps still are) dissident military men who constituted themselves as a group in Francoist Spain, then turned self-destructive fanatics and terrorists both in Algeria and in France.

The OAS and their followers were a complex bunch, not least in that they explicitly adopted tactics and organization from their principal opponents, the Algerian FLN, or National Liberation Front. Some had fought in the French Resistance against Nazi Germany. Not all were racist. And there was ample anxiety, suspicion, and contempt on the anti-de Gaulle side between some in the OAS on the one hand, and the ultras among the civilian pieds noirs on the other.

Forsyth wisely sketches this background very lightly or not at all. Instead, after setting the stage with the story of a real-life plot against de Gaulle, he has a council of French ministers and other big shots bring in  Claude Lebel, "the best detective in France," and if that sounds like the leading citizens of a Wild West town desperately seeking a new sheriff — or like the Continental Op being called in to clean up Poisonville in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest — there's more to come.

Lebel is an ordinary cop, and his belittling by pompous, condescending, artistocratic ministers with whom he meets nightly is a running motif of The Day of the Jackal. This may remind readers readers of a thousand stories about P.I.s or cops who have trouble with authority. One passage near novel's end even calls Lebel "the little detective," which would also work as a description of Hammett's squat little Op.

On the plot side of things, Forsyth alternates sections describing the Jackal's maneuvers all over Europe, and the authorities' efforts to catch him. The idea, of course, is to build suspense by getting the reader wondering if the cops will get to the Jackal before the Jackal gets to de Gaulle, and the chapters devoted to the authorities are an exciting, convincing story of a criminal investigation, only in this case of a criminal who plans to kill the president of France.

(Hear Frederick Forsyth talk about The Day of the Jackal in an interview with the BBC.)

***

A Savage War of Peace has one passage in particular that, whether or nor Alistair Horne intended so, may remind readers of a famous passage from Raymond Chandler. Take it away, Sir Alistair:

"Then, suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath. Men think, and behave, differently. It is a recurrent reminder that this is indeed Africa."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

“Algérie montait à la tête”

Charles de Gaulle in Aïn Témouchent,
Algeria, December 1960

  Sorry, folks, but, as Alistair Horne remarks several times in A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, “Algérie montait à la tête” — Algeria went to one's head (or, one might say, got under one's skin), and it's gone to mine. I'm not sure I'll visit any time soon (though Morocco or a return trip to Tunisia are not out of the question), but I bought a biography of Charles de Gaulle today and also Algerian White, by Assia Djebar.

Here are some of the small and large delights and surprises of Horne's book for me, who had known little about Algeria, particularly about that savage period in its history:

• Almost seven years into the bloody Algerian war, crowds of Muslims shouting: “Algérie algérienne… Vive de Gaulle!” in Aïn Témouchent — and the event that precipitated the deminstration: de Gaulle's astonishing reference in a 1960 speech to “an Algerian Republic, which will one day exist."
• That same year, as plots against de Gaulle's life by disaffected members of the military and pieds noirs mount by the minute, “A handsome young pied noir playboy, tired of life, decided to ram de Gaulle’s helicopter with his private plane.” He didn't do it because he couldn't figure out which helicopter was de Gaulle's.
• Horne's quotations from Frantz Fanon, known previously to me only as the apologist for revolutionary violence, the author of The Wretched of the Earth, and the revolutionary whose éclat was second only to Che Guevara's, on women's roles the Algerian uprisings.The mentions are brief, but the effects of women taking active roles where they had never done before must have been even more cataclysmic in Algeria's traditional Arab and Kabyle cultures than was the influx of women into the workforce in America during World War II.

I should note, too, that Assia Djebar, mentioned above, who is still around today, writes both in French and under an alias (she took the nom de plume because she feared her father's disapproval, her Wikipedia biography says.) Algerian White, according to a blurb, "weaves a tapestry of the epic and bloody ongoing struggle in her country between Islamic fundamentalism and the post-colonial civil society," which makes her seem like a woman worth reading.

It also sounds a bit like Yasmina Khadra, who writes in French under an assumed name and who criticizes both the state of Algeria and what he sees as Western misunderstanding of the Islamic world. Sounds to me like Algeria is one pretty interesting country, though I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable visiting these days.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria in the '50 and the '90s: Yasmina Khadra and Alistair Horne

I'm still burrowing into the complicated history of France and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century via Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace,  In the meantime, here's an old post about an Algerian crime novel that paints a grim picture of the country a few decades after the events Horne recounts.

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Yasmina Khadra's novels about an Algiers police inspector named Brahim Llob owe much to the tradition of the alienated detective, but Khadra's wit is more bitter than is usual for that wisecracking tradition, and his target is his own country. Thus the opening pages of Dead Man's Share offer this:

"I try to catch the wall doing something wrong so I can investigate it."

but also

"We Algerians react only to what happens to us, never to forestall something that might happen to us.

"While waiting for the storm, we carry on with our rituals. Our patron saints take good care of us, our garbage cans are overflowing with food, and the planet's impending economic crisis is as distant as a comet—to us."

The novel's opening pages are full of bitter reflections on what Algeria does to its thinkers, how it consumes people of talent, how its leaders want to keep the people dumb. There may be a touch of autobiography to such passages; "Yasmina Khadra" is a pen name that the author, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul, adopted to avoid censorship when serving as an Algerian army officer. He now lives and writes in France.

***

Dead Man's Share, published in French in 2004 as La part du mort and translated in 2009, is the fourth Brahim Llob novel. Khadra's comprehensive Web site (in French) includes excerpts, summaries, news, interviews, and the author's explanation of why he writes in French rather than Arabic.

A 2007 article surveys Khadra's work, including the Llob novels and non-series books that constitute a travelogue the Muslim world's miseries and agonies (The Attack, The Swallows of Kabul, The Sirens of Baghdad). And here are previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts about Khadra (click the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012, 2013

A savage war of reviews

My recent reading of The Day of the Jackal has led me to A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne's history of France's Algerian War.

The vast majority of the book’s free customer reviews on Amazon are five-star, but I was most interested in the two two-star reviews. Here's an excerpt from the first:

“Alistair Horne … is first and foremost hopelessly biased in favor of the Algerians.”

Here’s one from the second:

“This epic work … remains a remarkably racist work loved by State Department officials and neocons alike … Alistair Horne describes in gory detail atrocities committed by the FLN, or Algerian nationalist rebels, while skimming over far worse atrocities committed by the nice white-guy French.”

See also: Albert Camus, Yasmina Khadra, Rachid Taha

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Amara Lakhous on conflict Islamic style

Thursday's "Wide world of hate" post took up the diversity of ethnic resentment, conflict, and suspicion as revealed in crime fiction.

Amara Lakhous' Divorce Islamic Style, a social comedy in the guise of a spy story, offers this:

"I have to constantly remind myself that I’m Tunisian, and this neighborhood is full of Egyptians. Many people don’t know that there are rivalries among the Arabs. For example, it’s not smooth sailing between Syrians and Lebanese, between Iraqis and Kuwaitis, between Saudis and Yemenis, and so on and so on. It’s why they can’t seem to come up with a plan for unity, in spite of a common history, geography, Arabic, Islam, and oil. The model of the European Union will have to wait!"

That the Tunisian is really an Italian impersonating a Tunisian – albeit an Italian whose grandfather had been born in Tunisia of Italian parents before returning to Italy, where he longed to return to the land of his birth – suggests the fun Lakhous gets up to.

Here's what happens in the dormitory where the undercover Tunisian finds a place to stay:

“The non-Egyptian tenants are divided into two categories. Mohammed, the Moroccan, and I are in second place; we’re Arabs and we can communicate linguistically with the majority, limiting insult and injury where possible. But for the Senegalese and the Bangladeshi there’s no escape: they’re at the bottom. They have to submit or leave. To be Muslim isn’t enough. It’s better to be an Arab Muslim, but it would be fantastic to be an Egyptian Arab Muslim!”

Lakhous, Italian and born in Algiers, is only my latest reading encounter with Algeria. Didier Daeninckx built his novel Murder in Memoriam around the 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters. Yasmina Khadra challenges easy notions that the Islamic world is either fundamentalist suicide bombers or Western sellouts.

Coincidence, or did the bloody end of Algeria's colonial ties to France make the country a moral crucible for relations between the West and the Islamic world?

While you ponder the question, here's a song by the Algerian-based-in-France singer Rachid Taha that you've likely heard before, though perhaps not in this version.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Didier Daeninckx Day at Detectives Beyond Borders

Didier Daeninckx may have the only last name in crime fiction harder to spell than Duane Swierczynski's. I'd long wanted to read him, but little, if any of his cutting, politically charged crime writing was available in English, and I was not confident enough to try reading a novel in French.

This week, in the space of two days, I found his story "Les Négatifs de la Canebière," which I'm reading with the help of a dictionary, and the good folks at Melville House sent along Murder in Memoriam, a translation of Daeninckx's 1984 novel Meurtres pour memoire.

The book is a fictionalized examination of the Paris massacre of Oct. 17, 1961 that takes in the history of Drancy, the French town from where Jews were transported to Auschwitz. According to a publisher's blurb,  the novel "confronts two of the darkest chapters in French history — its(sic) colonial racism and its complicity in genocide."

And that, in turn, leads me to suspect affinities with the work of Dominque Manotti, Jean-Patrick Manchette. and perhaps Leonardo Sciascia as well.

***

"Les Négatifs de la Canebière" is available as part of a series called Les petits polars du Monde ("Little crime stories of the world"). Among the titles in the series is one by Sylvie Granotier, one of whose novels is now available in English as The Paris Lawyer from Le French Book, a new English-language imprint dedicated to making French writing available in English.

I wish they'd chosen a different name for their imprint, but it's hell of an idea. Like Hersilia Press, the imprint is a welcome source for English-language readers. Godspeed to these two exciting publishing ventures.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Commentary on Khadra

An article in CrimeSpree Magazine's online version shares thoughts about Yasmina Khadra, whose many novels include four about the Algiers police inspector Brahim Llob. The article discusses some of the controversies surrounding the complex figure of Khadra, among them his service in Algeria's army.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Yasmina Khadra goes to the movies

A new post brings the exciting news that the movie version of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri is to be released in France April 25. The site offers clips, stills, reviews, production notes, and interviews with Khadra and director Okacha Touita. The clips make the movie look like an urban war film, and Khadra's comments lead me to expect a film noir. Both are entirely appropriate, given the bleak and draining atmosphere of 1990s Algiers, as pictured in Khadra's novels about police Inspector Brahim Llob.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A Temple-Khadra connection

I've just come across a December article from the Australian called What the writers read, in which authors as well as critics are asked to choose the best books they read in 2006. Peter Temple chose Kel Robertson's Dead Set, for example, and he also had this to say about Mike Davis's Planet of Slums: Davis' "brilliant synthesis of the works of dozens of scholars leads to a frightening prediction: a world of `feral, failed cities' in which the well-off live in fortified sanctuaries while helicopter gunships patrol the slums and extremist religions of all kinds are among the opiates of the wretched masses."

Recent headlines from Rio de Janeiro lend credence to that vision. But so does the work of a writer I've discussed here several times: Yasmina Khadra. Here's Algiers police Inspector Brahim Llob in Khadra's novel Morituri: "Once past a police barrier we cross a downtown neighborhood with the air of an Indian cemetery, bypass a part of Bab el Oued where the simple folk fornicate ardently to keep themselves warm, and climb the sinuous road which leads to the city heights. Without warning the hovels vanish and we burst upon a little Eden bedecked with opulent villas, Swiss chalets and hanging gardens ... `Hell! Just take a peek at those fortresses, Super.'"

Earlier in the novel, Llob "gaze(s) at the guru in the photo: twenty-eight years old. Never went to school. Never had work. Messianic peregrinations across Africa, preaching absolute virulence and an implacable hatred toward the entire world. And now here he was setting himself up as a righter of wrongs: thirty-four murders, two volumes of fatwa, a harem in every bush and a scepter in every finger."

One generally associates wretchedness of the kind Davis discusses with teeming Asian or sub-Saharan African cities, but it sounds as if Brahim Llob's Algiers is right up there. Or down there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Love and war

Yesterday (or, strictly speaking, early this morning), I wrote about the corruption of Yasmina Khadra's Algiers in his novel Morituri. So pervasive and all-penetrating is the rot that it poisons and saps the protagonist's desire for his wife.

Today, in Philadelphia's excellent Big Jar Books, I chanced upon the following on the back cover of a Vintage paperback edition of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida:

"In medieval literature, Troy represents the perfection of normal human life on the brink of its destruction by a more corrupted force. By writing about this norm, Chaucer was creating a work that could help bring a declining society back to a state of health. The whole perpetual love theme in Chaucer relates to this, because love is one of the first relations to go awry in an unhealthy society."

As in fourteenth-century England, so in 1990s Algeria. Khadra knew what he was doing when he opened Morituri with a scene of poisoned love.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Yasmina Khadra's images of corruption

Commentators have noticed less than complimentary remarks about women in Yasmina Khadra's novels about Algiers police superintendent Brahim Llob. Take this selection, from the first page of Morituri:

Today my wife, my poor beast of burden, has regressed -- she holds no more attraction than a trailer lying across the road, but at least she's there when I am afraid of the dark.

What saves Khadra from censure for such remarks? For one thing, perhaps, Khadra himself was thought for years to be a woman. "Yasmina Khadra" is a nom de plume borrowed from two of his wife's names. Khadra's real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul; he took the alias when the Algerian army, in which he was an officer, demanded that he submit his work to military censors. (He revealed his identity only in 2001, after he had fled to France; Morituri was published in 1997.)

For another, that passage is full of pathetic, desperate tenderness. For yet another, the remark is in no way gratuitous. Disgust with the flesh is only part of the larger atmosphere of disenchantment that pervades Llob's world. The terror, the fear, the disillusionment, the political and moral corruption are so pervasive that they invade the most intimate aspects of the characters' lives. Poor Brahim Llob is alienated from even the most basic desires.

So, what saves the Llob stories from being total downers? The narrator/protagonist's grim sense of humor even among the direst circumstances. Here's Llob with Sid Lankabout ("Sid Spider"), one of the cast of vicious, slimy opportunists who populate the Llob books:

It seems (says Lankabout) that you are in the process of giving birth to a third tome.

This time (replies Llob) I'm writing about anti-matter.

Interesting. I didn't know you were an alchemist. Does anti-matter really exist?

Fundamentalism is its most active manifestation.

The defining rivalry of Llob's Algiers is that between corrupt, murderous Islamic fundamentalists and corrupt, monumentally rotten and venal government. Llob's disgust with the hypocrisy of both sides (and with the megalomania of the third side that reveals itself toward the ends of Morituri and of the second in the series, Double Blank) is characteristic of his appalling world. It also makes him an appealing crime-fiction protagonist.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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L'humour et la violence de Yasmina Khadra

Je viens de commencer Morituri, le premier roman par Yasmina Khadra qui concerne le commissaire Brahim Llob de la police d'Algers (il'y en a quatre dans la serie jusqu'à maintenant). J'essaie de le lire chapitre par chapitre -- un chapitre en traduction anglais, puis le meme en version originale. Patientiez-vous s'il vous plait, mes chers lecteurs!

Comme le deuxieme dans la serie, Double Blanc (Double Blank), les premieres pages de Morituri sont plein d'images de la violence, l'ordure, la crainte, la mort et la pourriture -- et aussi d'un humour frappant et tres noir: Le lieutenant de Llob "ne rentre plus chez lui, a Bab el Oued, depuis qu'un brelan de barbus est venu predendre les mesures de sa carotide pour lui choisir un couteau approprie."

"Sais-tu ce qui arrive aux gars qui se font trop de souci, Lino?" dit Llob a cet lieutenant traumatise. "Ils ont des enfants chauves."

Prochain: Morituri comme portrait de la corruption.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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The Politics of Killing a Victim by Decapitating Him and Shoving His Head in a Bidet

Yasmina Khadra is another pretty interesting guy -- yes, he's a man, despite the female name. (He's a former Algerian army officer who began writing under his wife's names to evade military censors and later fled to France in a self-imposed exile.) He's probably best known these days for novels that examine the causes and effects of terror and militant fundamentalism among ordinary people in the Middle East and North Africa: The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, In the Name of God and, coming next year in English translation, The Sirens of Baghdad. Khadra has also published four crime novels about an honest and disillusioned Algiers police inspector oppressed by his city's squalor and surrounded by terror and corruption.

Double Blank, the second of the four, makes my list because -- stop me if you've heard this before -- it takes special advantage of its setting. Setting is everything here, in the physical, political, social and psychological senses. Squalor abounds. Uncertainty pervades all. Fear and corruption seep into characters' work, into their diets. In the first book of the series, they even invade the protagonist's sleep. So, how does Khadra's Inspector Brahim Llob survive? He's honest. He's compassionate, yet without illusions. He's wary of power, but he confronts the powerful when he has to. He has a dry sense of humor. He's a North African Philip Marlowe. (He's not quite that, though several reviewers have seen stylistic parallels with Chandler. Hammett is a pertinent comparison, too. Double Blank's final pages are a distant echo of The Maltese Falcon's.)

The first murder victim, whose grim fate I borrowed for the title of this post, is a senior diplomat. This is Algeria in the 1990s, so Islamic fundamentalists must be responsible, right? Llob is not so sure, and his investigation takes him in surprising directions. Not that Llob is sentimentally disposed toward Islamic fundamentalists. One such character is called "the Hairdresser" -- because he has a history of chopping off his victims' heads.

The novel's two dark forces -- murderous fundamentalism, and spectacular official corruption -- hover like specters above everything, and a third force creeps into play before the villain gets his in the end. Llob must work against and around all three, without illusions and with a grimly humorous attitude, to solve the crime. Here's Llob with a powerful figure in the government who has called him in for a secret assignment:

"I must admit, I'm taken by surprise. Why me?"

"Why not you?"

That's not good enough for me. After thirty years of hand-to-hand combat with disappointment, I'm certain that nothing in our country happens by coincidence.

And here he is with a sleazy character, a possible small-time terrorist who has been evading him and withholding information:

I address Big Chief Standing Yak: "I've got an idea. Let's play Arabian Nights, okay? You be Scheherazade and I'll be the sultan. You can tell me all about your little pals, their hideouts, their plans. Ewegh, over there, he can be Damocles. If you stop talking, he'll hit you over the head until your brains start leaking out of your nostrils. If you survive, you earn a reprieve until tomorrow night. What do you think?"

==============

For all its wisecracking, Double Blank is a serious book. It is also elliptical, with shock chapter endings and days- or weeks-long leaps of time that leave out much of the detail one would find in a conventional police procedural. These two traits of the Llob novels account for a rather spectacular piece of literary snobbery in a blurb on Double Blank's back cover from a Washington Post review of Morituri, the first Llob novel:

"Khadra is often able to finesse the prosaic bits of information-gathering and interviews with suspects that hobble less intelligent mystery writers." (The highlighting is mine.)

May the odious prig who wrote that sentence spend an eternity of sleepless nights on a mattress filled with the collected works of Ed McBain.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006