bookshelf

THE STAR OF ALGIERS

Name: THE STAR OF ALGIERS
Author: Aziz Chouaki
ISBN: 1-55597-412-0

by Aziz Chouaki & translated by Ros Schwartz & Lulu Norman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005

A chilling portrait of painful attempts to reconcile past colonial sins with crying present needs.

bookshelf

An Algerian singer finds his star waning with the onslaught of the Islamic revolution—in musician-playwright Chouaki’s politically trenchant third novel, his first to appear in English.

It’s 1990 when, in Algiers, the first rumblings by Islamist extremists are heeded by the disaffected and largely impoverished populace. Méziane Boudjiri, known as Moussa Massy on stage, is 36 and a singer of modern Kabyle (African Berber) music who lives in three rooms with fourteen of his family members in a soulless apartment block called Cité Mer et Soleil. Moussa is handsome, scornful of the “beards,” and determined to make a name for himself and to quit the grinding despair of his country. Yet, despite his stint of well-paying gigs, Moussa’s income goes to help support his family, and marriage to the lovely, sheltered Fatiha is out of the question without an apartment of his own. With a smooth, wealthy diplomat’s son, Rachid, acting as his manager, Moussa gains a newspaper interview and is hired to play at upscale clubs frequented by the European-educated upper class; his name is well known and he even begins to record his music—before it’s pirated and adulterated without his consent. Moussa’s star seems to be inexorably tied to the fate of his country: with the takeover by the Islamists, his fellow musicians flee the country, his girlfriend’s traditional family forces her to marry a more suitable cousin, and the fancy club Moussa works for becomes a den of thugs. “Day after day, Moussa deteriorates, at the same pace of Algeria, allegro,” Chouaki writes in his dictation-like prose, switching briefly from third person to first and jotting off strings of graphic impressions. Chouaki’s spurts of slangy dialogue read a bit stilted in English, but the overall result is viscerally affecting. Descending into drug abuse, apathy, and violence, Moussa is eventually transformed into the same fanatic, cold-blooded Jihadist he once reviled.

A chilling portrait of painful attempts to reconcile past colonial sins with crying present needs.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 1-55597-412-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.