false 106335 0 0 2119879 1583220097 9781583220092 0 <![CDATA[So Vast the Prison]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2119879.So_Vast_the_Prison 0.0 0 So Vast the Prison, Assia Djebar takes full advantage of the novel as a flexible art form, moving majestically between narrative and history, bending the book's shape to reflect its concerns. In rich, poetic prose, she describes the women of Algeria and their inner lives of faith, longing, and grief. Aside from their aesthetic value, Djebar's innovative narrative strategies create an additional poignancy, as the artistic freedom she enjoys rubs against the restrictions placed on the women whom she portrays.

The novella-sized first section begins in the capital city of Algiers, in the world of a post-colonial middle class that straddles French and Algerian cultures. The narrator, an educated married woman, is consumed by love for a younger man who works in her office building. This secret, platonic love could happen almost anywhere: her actions are restricted less by the Islamic society than by her emotional commitment to her marriage and "the watchmen of bourgeois respectability." But when the narrator confides her hidden feelings to her husband, his response makes clear Algeria's very different history and culture.

He struck and I slipped to the floor.... then I heard him, as if echoing from within a prison cell in which he found himself, in which he wrestled, in which he was trying to keep me. From inside this nightmare space, inside this bodily fear, my eyes closed, and hidden under my arms, under my lifted elbows, under my already bloody hands, I heard and I would almost have answered with a laugh, not a madwoman's laugh nor one of tearfulness, but the laugh of a woman who was relieved and struggling to free herself. "Adulteress!" he repeated, "Anywhere, except this city of iniquity, you would deserve to be stoned!"
The book's focus then shifts to a historical account of the relationship between Muslim women and the lost languages of North Africa (enigmatic traces of which have survived), as Djebar explores the symbiotic relationship that women have had with words, serving as the culture's literary caretakers, "preserv[ing] the writing while their men wage war in the sun or dance before the fires at night."

Djebar combines themes of narrative and erased histories in the third section, as the narrator seeks to "recapture the deep song strangled in the throat of my people"--that is, to convey (and thus preserve) the lives of the contemporary Algerian women who have been veiled and silenced. The section's short narratives, mingled with the experiences of the narrator while making a film in rural Algeria, are fascinating and inspiring. This Algeria is a world of women-only ritual dances, bride thieves, gossip in the hammams (public baths), sorceresses, and an unforgettable 8-year-old shepherdess who gazes at the narrator "without real curiosity but with fond indulgence." In Djebar, these stories have found a courageous, gifted teller--though one who is sadly aware that her voice is a lonely substitute for what should be a chorus. --John Ponyicsanyi

]]> 42357 3.80 307 50 106335 4.50 2 1 1995 1692887 0810117363 9780810117365 0 <![CDATA[Strasbourg Nights]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1692887.Strasbourg_Nights 0.0 0 42357 3.80 307 50 106335 4.50 2 1 1997 6678142 1564785289 9781564785282 1 <![CDATA[Western]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6678142-western 5.00 1 A pioneering French woman turns her eye toward the most classically male American genre. Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy—a stranger in town with a terrible secret—Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger’s grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots. A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, Western presents us with the world behind the clichés, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. Montalbetti’s daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles—victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms—makes Western a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies. .]]> 1224941 5.00 1 1 106335 4.50 2 1 2009 1202762 0472066668 9780472066667 0 <![CDATA[Black Salt: Poems]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202762.Black_Salt_Poems 4.00 1 Black Salt collects two decades of Glissant's poetry and makes it available for the first time in English. It is a poetry that is aesthetically distinguished and historically significant, characterized by potent metaphors of local identity.
</div><div>Published in France as Le Sel Noir, the volume brings together in English translation three separate poetry collections from Glissant's early years, Le Sang Rivé (Blood Riveted), Le Sel Noir (Black Salt), and Boises (Yokes). Read together, these three works embody Glissant's project to develop a Caribbean literature no longer contained by European language. He incorporates conventions of orality and ties the poems concretely to a Martiniquan experience of history and geography/geology, expressing an ongoing search for identity in a struggle between memory and forgetting. From Riveted Blood through Black Salt to Yokes, Glissant can be seen to be developing a poetic instrument that is increasingly stark and increasingly particularized as it undergoes inflections that derive from oral and Creole sources and simultaneously opens to the local landscape, the traditional culture, and the history of Martinique.
</div><div>Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French, City University of New York, Graduate Center. His other books in English include Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation, and Faulkner Mississippi, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Betsy Wing's translations include Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault, and Hélène Cixous's The Book of Promethea.
</div>]]> 73976 4.03 78 5 106335 4.50 2 1 1999 5424220 1559720506 9781559720502 0 <![CDATA[Look Out for Hydrophobia: Stories]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5424220.Look_Out_for_Hydrophobia_Stories 0.0 0 106335 4.50 2 1 1990 6050934 0571169732 9780571169733 0 <![CDATA[Michel Foucault]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6050934.Michel_Foucault 0.0 0 69310 3.58 38 5 106335 4.50 2 1 1993