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.

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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

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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Yasmina Khadra and Bill James interviewed

This evening's Web surfing turned up recently published interviews with two of my favorite crime writers. The interviews are more interesting than most and should make good reading even if you don't know Bill James and Yasmina Khadra (and I think you should know both).

Epic India carries this discussion with Khadra, whose work includes crime novels featuring Algiers Police Inspector Brahim Llob. Khadra speaks bluntly about terrorism, Western media, and Arab leaders as well as with passion about his own background and his love for certain Arab writers who may be unknown in the West.

Here's what he says about the Llob novels, which are funny but also chilling in their evocation of violence and corruption:

“I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. I dreamed to reconcile the Algerian reader with his literature. I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.” (The interviewer speaks English, and Khadra speaks Arabic and French, which may account for the very occasional odd-looking word. But trust me: Khadra always makes himself clear. )

Could this sensitive and talented author be guilty of underestimating his own work or perhaps even of condescension toward crime fiction, to which he has made memorable contributions?

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Crimespree has just republished this 2oo4 interview with Bill James, author of the Harpur and Iles series. James' topics include his manic co-protagonist Desmond Iles ("He's basically a good cop. But very basically."), the laughable pretensions of his drug dealers, and some interesting thoughts on female characters I have not discussed here.

He also talks about the music he likes (Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, among other musicians), and his non-crime writing (He's written and published a study of Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.)

© 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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Life during wartime

I've just picked up Dan Fesperman's Lie in the Dark, published in 1999 and featuring Vlado Patric, a homicide investigator in wartime Sarajevo. The opening pages offer an eerie description of daytime calm in a war zone, and an unexpectedly testy confrontation between the coffee-deprived Patric and a speechifying reporter.

"I think you are oversimplifying a complex situation," Patric tells the reporter, who replies: "Yes, well that's what I'm paid for, isn't it. Take all the nice blurry grays and turn them into black and white for the public to digest before moving onto the horoscopes and the latest from the Royals." (The reporter's preachiness and self-pity are interesting, considering that Fesperman is himself a reporter who covered Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, according to the book's author information.)

I am guessing that this somewhat uneasy opening is Fesperman's way of dealing with the special problems of setting a murder mystery in a war zone. It reminds me of the uneasy self-justification J. Robert Janes offers at the beginning of each of his St. Cyr-Kohler novels, about a French detective and a Gestapo investigator who team up to solve crimes in Nazi-occupied France:

I do not condone what happened during these times, I abhor it. But during the Occupation of France the everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?

Yasmina Khadra's Brahim Llob novels and Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy handle the task more smoothly. Khadra integrates the horror and tension of 1990s Algiers into his first-person narrator-protagonist's everyday activities and observations. Kerr does something similar, plunging his blunt, wise-cracking protagonist directly into the action and offering wry observations about all that surrounds him, including noxious signs of Nazi terror. The observations are all the more striking for their off-handedness. No need for self-justification here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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?"

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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