literary reviews about tahar djaout

[akrouh]

Algerian author and journalist Tahar Djaout is, unfortunately, best known for having gotten himself killed (apparently by Islamic fundamentalists). In fact, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was a very active -- and probably the leading -- figure in what remained of Algeria's once vibrant literary culture. He published numerous works of fiction and poetry, and also worked as a journalist -- and that in an increasingly hostile (and ultimately deadly) climate. Despite his international renown (martyrdom helped, but he had already reached an audience -- at least in the French-speaking world -- before his death), The Last Summer of Reason is, apparently, his first work to be translated into English, nearly a decade after his death.
The posthumously published novel is an appropriate introduction to his work and life. It tells the story of a bookseller, Boualem Yekker. He lives in a country obviously modeled on Algeria. Like Algeria in the early 1990s, the country around him is obviously going to the dogs. Or, more accurately (and even worse), to the religious fundamentalists. It was once a Republic; now it is a "Community in the Faith". V.B.s ("Vigilant Brothers") make sure that everyone is following their interpretation of the holy rules that now govern the land. Self-styled "bands of enlightened redeemers" follow suit. Soon even the little kids get into the act, throwing stones at those who aren't conforming to the constricting, intolerant mould ordained by the local high-priests.
The world around the bookseller is shrinking, and grinding to a halt. It is a summer when the future hangs in the balance -- though the scales already have almost completely tipped to the side of the religious nuts. Still: it "was the summer of attacks, but also of defiance." There is still some hope, some freedom, some space. But, Yekker realizes, not for long:

Boualem Yekker calls this season the last summer of reason. Sometimes, the last summer of history. Indeed, thereafter the country went freewheeling, leaving history behind.

At first Yekker is only on the periphery of danger. He is "neither elegant nor talented", which puts him out of the spotlight: "what is persecuted above all, and more than people's opinions, is their ability to create and propagate beauty." Still, Yekker is a purveyor of these outrageous idea- and beauty-filled objects known as books, so he doesn't fit in too well in this new, retrograde society.
Business isn't exactly booming, of course. Touchingly Djaout describes Yekker's brief moments of hope when he sees people gazing in the shop window. But there is hardly a market for the sorts of books he has any longer. One acquaintance, Ali Elbouliga, still comes to while away time there. Otherwise, Yekker remains largely alone in his bookish world -- and the books ultimately prove almost as much a burden as a solace.
Family life also gets more complicated when his daughter turns on him. "The illness of fanaticism had attacked her." She is transformed, "covered with superior certainties".
Yekker tries to continue to live his life in the manner he is accustomed to, but there is no escape from the encroaching fanaticism. It crushes all opposition. Any semblance of rationality is done away with. Even weather forecasts are banned, as if these called some all-mighty's grand plan (and his power) into question. (What a pathetic god it must be they're protecting, if he can be threatened by mortals' barely educated guesses at tomorrow's weather; doesn't the fact that the meteorologists barely ever get it right instead reinforce the idea of divine omnipotence ?)
Imagination is dulled, "the world has become aphasic, opaque, and sullen; it is wearing mourning clothes." Books "constitute the safest refuge against this world of horror" all around Yekker, but the books are also a danger to him. Eventually they must make place for "the one, the irremovable Book of resigned certainty."
The threats against Yekker mount. What is, at first, almost harmless child's play intensifies to very real danger. Might conquers right:

They have understood the danger in words, all the words they cannot manage to domesticate and anesthetize. For words, put end to end, bring doubt and change. Words above all must not conceive of the utopia of another form of truth, of unsuspected paths, of another place of thought.

The downward spiral of a nation losing itself in a limiting ideology continues. Djaout allows for some hope, at least wondering about the future at the end of his novel. But that is the fiction. The murder of Djaout: that is how the story ends.
The Last Summer of Reason is a very sad book. Djaout's portrayal of a country going to ruin is almost gentle, his attacks circumspect. Reason has almost been done away with. Yekker faces it almost uncomprehendingly: how does one battle the forces of irrationality ? He does stand up, in his own way against them, but it is not an even battle. In the name of their god the fanatics are unwilling to tolerate other opinions, other ideas, other ways of living. And they are willing to resort to the most reprehensible and cowardly tactics and actions to silence those they believe to be their enemies.
It is a sad world Djaout describes -- all the more so because it is, in too many places, much like the real world. In presenting this world through Yekker's frustrated experiences Djaout adopts the proper tone, avoiding sounding too self-righteous, his condemnation sad and resigned more than anything else. The style gets a bit elegiac and the translation occasionally goes a bit off kilter: "Like a sagacious cat, the wind is playing with papers and dead leaves whirling them around where they are." But on the whole it reads quite well.
There have been many books like The Last Summer of Reason -- though most from the past few decades have dealt with similar issues under European totalitarian regimes. Djaout's is certainly worthwhile. It is a fine, moving literary work, though lacking some of the polish and punch of other examples of the genre. It is, of course, also all the more poignant because the reader knows what happened to Djaout, an author who paid the ultimate price for his art and his convictions.
Recommended.

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/algerie/djaoutt1.htm

[akrouh]

Everyday Subversions



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By ADAM SHATZ
Published: December 23, 2001


THE LAST SUMMER
OF REASON
By Tahar Djaout.
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager.
145 pp. St. Paul:
Ruminator Books. $19.

A defiant critic of fundamentalism at a time when an Islamic revolution in his country seemed all but certain, the Algerian novelist and poet Tahar Djaout knew that he was living on borrowed time. ''If you speak, you die,'' he wrote in one of his best-known poems. ''If you are silent, you die / So, speak and die.'' When a group of young men came for him on May 26, 1993, he was nothing if not prepared. Shot in the head three times outside of his apartment, he fell into a coma and died a week later, the first of 57 Algerian intellectuals killed in a wave of terror. Djaout (who appears as a character in Gloria Emerson's 2000 novel ''Loving Graham Greene'') was an important symbolic target. More than anyone, he embodied the tolerant, cosmopolitan outlook of Algeria's French-speaking intelligentsia, whom fundamentalists vilify as latter-day colonialists, obstacles to the dream of an Islamic state.

In the last few weeks of his life, as the civil war between Islamic rebels and Algeria's government grew increasingly brutal, Djaout completed a short, despairing parable about a country ravaged by Islamic fanaticism. Discovered among his papers and published in France two years ago, ''The Last Summer of Reason'' has acquired a new and haunting immediacy since the attacks of Sept. 11. The book originated as a serial novel, published in Ruptures, a weekly Djaout founded in January 1993. He referred to the novel as a ''small fiction in the form of reality,'' and despite some finely rendered lyrical digressions, the writing often has the brisk, compressed texture of a pamphlet.

Algerian readers would have instantly recognized the scenes described in it. Roadblocks set up by ''bearded young men, rigged out like Afghan warriors,'' ''huge Mercedes parked in long lines near the mosques,'' ''bands of enlightened redeemers'' raiding the beaches -- these images are snapshots of Algiers in 1993, one of the bloodiest years of a war that led to the deaths of over 100,000 people, most of them civilians. Deftly translated from the French by Marjolijn de Jager, and with a foreword by Wole Soyinka, the novel provides an anguished dispatch from what nearly became Algeria's future.

Djaout, a timid, refined man with horn-rimmed glasses and a handlebar mustache, was born in a small village in the Berber-speaking province of Greater Kabylia in 1954, the year Algeria's war of independence against the French began. Raised in Algiers, he published his first collection of poems, ''Barbed Solstice,'' at 21. Like many of Algeria's most gifted writers -- Mouloud Feraoun, Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar -- he chose to write in French, which led his work to be classified by the state as ''foreign literature.'' It was nothing of the sort. Djaout's great subject was his country's slow, painful effort to enter modernity, and he examined it with the troubled love of a native son. Like Camus, he felt a profound kinship with the Mediterranean landscape, with its startling contrasts of sea and sand, sky and stone. Islamic piety struck him as alien to Algiers, which he praised as a ''sensual and cheerful city baring its chest to the sea.''

Boualem Yekker, the gentle, contemplative hero of ''The Last Summer of Reason,'' owns a bookstore in a country -- never named but clearly Algeria -- that has fallen to the Vigilant Brothers, a group much like the Taliban. (The leadership of Algeria's most extreme rebel faction, the Groupe Islamique Armé, included several ''Arab-Afghans,'' veterans of the jihad against the Soviet Army who now hoped to overthrow their own ''impious'' government.) Yekker, who is, like his creator, a reader of European literature, a skeptic, a dreamer, has no place in the stern new era. The Vigilant Brothers have banned alcohol and music, as well as spare tires and weather forecasts (''how can one argue and quibble over patterns known only to God?''). In the soccer stadium where Yekker played as a boy there is now a towering mosque, ''where lists of men to be punished are regularly posted.''
Abandoned by his wife and children, Yekker has so far been spared the Brothers' wrath, largely because he is ''neither elegant nor talented.'' (Djaout himself was not so fortunate.) But he is grimly aware that his days are numbered. Outside his store, children throw stones at him, carrying ''death within them'' and ''ready to inflict it as well as to turn it against themselves without so much as raising an eyebrow.'' Eventually, ''books will have to be burned -- to make place for the one, the irremovable Book of resigned certainty.'' As he waits for the inevitable auto-da-fé, Yekker clings to words as if they were ''life preservers,'' retreating to a vanishing world of memories and reveries. He is not a man of politics. He is, rather, a lover -- of books, dreams, the sea. And though Yekker is thinly sketched, there is something moving about his fidelity to these loves, against an order that seeks, like all forms of totalitarianism, to ''prune humanity.'' What looks like resignation is actually tenacity, even heroism.

An elegiac ode to literature and a furious protest against intolerance, ''The Last Summer of Reason'' is ultimately less successful as a novel than as a polemic. Its message -- that literature is the soil on which a civilization grows -- is scarcely less literal than that of the Vigilant Brothers, however appealing we may find it in comparison. The Islamic characters we meet dissolve into a faceless mass, candidates for murder or martyrdom. Like many members of Algeria's French-speaking elite, Djaout views them much as the American news media now view the angry, bearded men of the Muslim world -- as ''the street,'' a menacing and irrational mob.

Djaout's book is best read for its tender portrait of a secular, cosmopolitan man among the believers. There are millions of Boualem Yekkers throughout the Islamic world, although we seldom hear of them in the West. (How much easier it then becomes to cast the war against terror as a ''clash of civilizations.'') They are a frightened, insecure group, condemned to internal exile; like Yekker, they have developed, in their terrible solitude, ''the reflexes of a shadow tribe.'' In the final scene of ''The Last Summer of Reason,'' Yekker sits on a bench overlooking Algiers at dusk. As he mourns the destruction of his city, he wonders, ''Will there be another spring?'' This was Djaout's last sentence, written in his last spring.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DC133FF930A15751C1A9679C8B 63

[akrouh]

The Last Summer of Reason (St. Paul, MN: Ruminator Books, 2001) and The Watchers (Ruminator, 2002) by Tahar Djaout; paperbacks released by Ruminator, 2003

This review begins with a confession. When I first saw a copy of The Last Summer of Reason while browsing in a bookstore off Harvard Square, it wasn’t Tahar Djaout’s name that caught my eye, but the name of Wole Soyinka, who supplied the introduction to this short novel. Intrigued as to whom Soyinka, Nigeria’s 1986 Nobel laureate in literature, might take the time to introduce, I quickly discovered a writer who merited such attention. Born in Algeria, Djaout was assassinated in 1993, an event attributed to members of the Islamic Salvation Front, a fundamentalist group that interpreted Djaout’s writings as a threat to their interests and those of other Muslims. Djaout had been a novelist, poet, and journalist, publishing eleven books total by the time of his death at the age of 39. He received the Prix Mèditerranèe for his novel The Watchers (Les Vigiles), originally published in 1991. All told, a life and promising career in literature cut short for political reasons, a situation no doubt familiar to Soyinka who has similarly dodged the capricious violence of postcolonial Nigerian politics. But what is his writing like, beyond these tragic circumstances?

Recently released in paperback, The Last Summer of Reason was found as an unedited manuscript among Djaout’s belongings after his death. Soyinka describes it as a “posthumous allegory . . . beamed at the complacent conscience of the world,” and it certainly does contain a political purpose, in many ways appearing as a prophesy of Djaout’s own fate. The story is a simple one: Boualem Yekker, the story’s central protagonist, is a bookstore owner in an unnamed coastal town in a country meant to approximate an imagined Algeria of the near future. The state is fundamentalist in orientation, led by a group known as the Vigilant Brothers. Given this context, Boualem is consequently forced to watch his every move, for fear of receiving some form of punishment or a violent end at the hands of this intolerant regime. Djaout successfully creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, with the city feeling simultaneously empty and ready to explode in violence. However, despite this sense of menace on each page, not much happens. Djaout describes Boualem’s day-to-day life, takes us through his dreams and memories, and leaves us in the end with the immensity of an uncertain future. We read of a final vacation with his family (the “last summer” of the title), his friend Ali Elbouliga, his unconventional political opinions, a vivid nightmare involving his son. An ironic process of character development therefore occurs – the more he loses, the fuller his character becomes – with Boualem’s life being one of increasing isolation, where his children, family, and even his books gradually fail him. By the end of the novel, he, like the reader, is left hollowed out.

Taken as a whole then, The Last Summer of Reason resembles other dystopian novels such as Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The individual versus the state provides the primary dramatic tension. There is also an affinity with Camus’ The Stranger, with its Algerian locale, its concise prose style, and its modern, existential angst. However, Djaout’s novel falls short in embodying a philosophical perspective in the same way that Camus’ does. There is a set of politics to be sure, with a clear critique against the oppressive nature of fundamentalism towards individual freedom. However, this message – often dogmatically pursued within the text – comes off as a conventional political stance rather than a deeper, philosophical one. The slightness of the story therefore, unfortunately, serves to undermine any larger achievement. Given the unfinished nature of the manuscript, one is left to wonder what it might have become had Djaout been able to finish it.

The Watchers provides something of an answer. Reading this novel after The Last Summer of Reason, one is gripped with a fuller sense of Djaout’s ability with allegory as well as his capacity to draw a broader social and historical panorama. This expansiveness is to some extent achieved by doubling up. This novel contains two characters: Menouar Ziada, a veteran of an (again) unnamed country’s revolutionary movement, and Mahfoudh Lemdjad, an aspiring – and potentially seditious – inventor whom Menouar is assigned to watch over. Mahfoudh has designed a loom – symbolism intended – and goes through a process of applying for a patent and then for a passport to present his invention at a fair in Heidelberg. These situations are (no surprise) Kafkaesque with their combination of surface absurdity and hidden threat. If Mahfoudh finds himself confronted with the suspicion and inertia of the state, Menouar in parallel finds himself questioning the legacy of his past participation in that state’s revolution and his current role as one of its supposed defenders. Each experiences periods of introspection, with Djaout supplying dialogue pregnant with political import. Menouar: “Does having liberated the nation give one the right to be so heavy a burden on it, to confiscate its riches as well as its future?” Mahfoudh: “Aren’t we running the risk of being carried back centuries in time and losing the values that people have created with their sweat and blood, such as democracy, sexual equality, individual freedom, freedom of expression, and religious freedom?” Djaout’s central theme of the individual versus the state again surfaces.

Menouar and Mahfoudh appear destined to meet; although, without foreclosing the ending, Djaout leaves a surprise. The novel finishes by underscoring the dangers of both resisting and collaborating with the state. In this sense, Djaout offers a striking allegory regarding the complex legacy of postcolonial Algeria, with its origins in a violent anti-colonial revolution and its contemporary struggles between secular and religious political parties. The individual, caught in these changing, fluid social conditions, is forced to decide between the risk of affiliation versus the risk of individual desire. The past, present, or future: none offers comfort or certainty in this matter.

The transparency of politics within Djaout’s fiction may, for some readers, become tedious. As briefly hinted at above, his characters do not often speak about the mundane, only the political or metaphysical. The sense that they are intended to express Djaout’s own opinions is consequently pervasive, with their development as fully achieved persona feeling limited. However, unlike 1984, The Last Summer of Reason does not take place in a distant future but appears as an expression of what is currently happening or, at the least, what might happen in the very near future. Djaout’s death all but confirms this. In leaving these books, one is forced to consider this entanglement between fact and fiction, to ponder what Djaout might have accomplished. By leaving these books, Djaout suggests a path of clear ambition and, in all likelihood, eventual importance. Christopher J. Lee

http://www.barcelonareview.com/rev/39.htm#2

[akrouh]

The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout

Tahar Djaout was assassinated for writing books like The Last Summer of Reason. His words are disconcerting, discomforting, and it's not only the fundamentalist Islamic groups (who have been attributed the responsibility for his death) who should be uneasy, it should be all of us. This book is an elegant argument against the complacency of political correctness that excuses brutal repression in the name of cultural differences. As recent events have all too clearly illustrated, hate allowed to fester anywhere will eventually spill out of those boundaries we thought had contained it.

It's all too easy to let any discussion of this book spill over into politics, because this book is more than a novel. Hopefully someday people will be able to read this book purely for its simple poetic prose, appreciate it just for its finely crafted story. Right now, I find it hard to read it in any other way than as a window into the political climate of our times.

As such The Last Summer of Reason is brilliant and chilling. As I was reading it I kept trying to compare it to dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World in my head, but the comparisons didn't quite fit because this is not quite a dystopian novel. Instead of immersing the reader in a futuristic world in which personal freedoms are a thing of the past, it starts fairly innocuously, in a country run by religious fundamentalists, but in which one can still buy and sell controversial books, people could still resist.

What is fascinating about this book is the slow progression of intolerance. What is terrifying about this book is how rarely it is the authorities who enforce the new codes of behavior, but fellow citizens. In the beginning, it is the children, easily molded, who shame their parents into belief. Once the children have converted their parents, they start in on the neighborhood. Suddenly they are the authorities, and they throw rocks and break windows in order to punish those not living up to the image of the perfectly devout. Finally the adults join in, monitoring the behavior of their families, their neighbors, complete strangers.

It is a horrifying thing to watch, a horrifying thing to imagine happening to you, to people you love. It is terrifying to think that this base intolerance must lie in the hearts of all of us, sleeping, waiting for the right time to come out. Somewhere deep inside, are we all the gestapo? Do we all long to enforce our own moral codes onto others? Given someone else's moral codes, would we all just as happily press those onto everyone we know? How long would you resist, if your freedoms were being taken away millimeter by millimeter? How hard would you struggle, if they were not your freedoms being taken away, but your neighbor's? your enemy's?

The Last Summer of Reason is a great book not because it answers such big questions, but because it provokes them. This is a book of our times, and it is later than you think.

The Last Summer of Reason
Tahar Djaout
Ruminator Books
ISBN 1886913501

http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2002_10_000335.php