The German Mujahid in Around the World in 80 Books

Oct 27, 2009 Tony rated it liked it

Shelves: translated-fiction, novels, own-loanable, algeria

The Holocaust is such a vast and unfathomable human story that we will likely never see the end of art that concerns itself with it. To a certain extent, that can create Holocaust "fatigue" -- do we really need another book/film/play/poem about the six million? This prize-winning novel attempts to answer that question with an emphatic yes. For one thing, it's considered to be the first book by an Arab writer to deal with the Holocaust, and given the complicated history between Arabs and Jews, th The Holocaust is such a vast and unfathomable human story that we will likely never see the end of art that concerns itself with it. To a certain extent, that can create Holocaust "fatigue" -- do we really need another book/film/play/poem about the six million? This prize-winning novel attempts to answer that question with an emphatic yes. For one thing, it's considered to be the first book by an Arab writer to deal with the Holocaust, and given the complicated history between Arabs and Jews, that's important in and of itself. But it also sounds the alarm in a way that evokes the famous Santayana adage that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The "those" is any government that's facing a radical Islamic challenge -- specifically, a corrupt and repressive Algerian regime and a liberal French democracy. The provocative (and somewhat reductive) message the author very explicitly and bluntly lays out there is that modern Islamic fundamentalism is equivalent to Nazism and to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in any outrages committed in its name.

The story is simple, but not simply told. Set in the mid-1990s, it revolves around Malrich and Rachel Schiller -- two German/Algerian brothers living in France. When their German father and Algerian mother are killed in a massacre in a small village in Algeria, Rachel comes into possession of his father's papers. While they had known him as a loving if stern father, a respected village elder, and a fighter for Algerian independence, his papers reveal him to have been a Nazi -- a possible war criminal who may have worked on the development of Zyklon B. The book follows the reactions of the two young men to this shocking bit of news, while also drawing a vivid picture of their place in mid-90s France. This is all told via alternating diary entries -- Malrich's contemporary one, and Rachel's from several years previously.

The overall effect of this is rather garbled, as this hopping back and forth in time and voice makes the narrative quite disjointed. Malrich's voice is fairly straightforward and effective, but Rachel's diaries never really worked for me. We can imagine his psychological distress at discovering that his father has an evil past, but his somewhat trite philosophizing/sermonizing ramblings take the whole "sins of the father" thing to extremes. Meanwhile, Malrich confronts history with a little more common sense, while at the same time struggles to break free of the suffocating grip Islamists have on the ghetto he lives in. (Here, the author is providing a fictional window into an aspect of modern Europe that is being increasingly discussed in books such as While Europe Slept.)

Western -- and particularly American -- readers may also struggle with a certain lack of context throughout the book. Readers would certainly benefit from having a basic grasp of the history of France in Algeria, immigration in France, and the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. For example, it's kind of important to the story that you know that the massacres such as the one in this book in which the parents were killed were fairly common during the Algerian civil war, and in many cases (including the one depicted in the book), the perpetrators' identity and affiliation were never known. Some of the terminology is similarly opaque, such as the repeated references to Malrich living in a "sink estate," which is a specifically British term for a kind of poverty-stricken ghetto.

In the end, I the book left me somewhat disappointed. While there are certain scenes here and there that are quite evocative, and certain situations are quite well drawn (such as Malrich's visit to his parents' village), I'd be hard pressed to identify anything particularly thought-provoking or moving about the book. There's nothing depicted about France or Algeria, and no argument being made about history or radical Islamists, that I haven't previously seen or heard elsewhere. Obviously other readers will take away different things, but for me it never achieved any emotional power. Still, full credit to the publisher for bringing voices like this into English translation. ...more

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