Film Review: The Dreamed Ones (Austria)

I’m interested in literary biography, and that extends to lives examined through film. I thought this 2016 Austrian movie, directed by Ruth Beckermann, could be interesting, focusing as it does on the correspondence between Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the German-language poet Paul Celan.

The film is a low-budget affair, in which two actors (played by Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp) meet in a studio to read and record the two writers’ letters to each other. Much of the film takes place in a single room, with occasional forays to a fire escape for a smoke. Mirroring the caring but frequently rivalrous relationship that unfolds in the content of the letters, the young actors seem at times very close, confiding and smoking and listening to music, while at other times a chasm seems to emerge between them. The emotional intensity of the letters is conveyed through lingering shots of the actors’ faces and the female actor’s frequent tears – whether these response are unscripted is unclear. I’ve got a high tolerance for pretentious nonsense, but this film tipped me over the edge.

In its defence, the relationship between the two writers is genuinely fascinating, although the film tried its best to detract from that. Probably better to go direct to the letters themselves.

Celan was a Holocaust survivor whose parents had been killed by the Nazis, while Bachmann’s father had returned home safely from the Second World War after fighting on the German side. Celan had clearly experienced unknowable pain, and as a refugee attempted to recreate a life from scratch, first in Vienna and then in Paris. Perhaps he felt that things came too easily to Bachmann, and he certainly at one stage seems to have accused her of some degree of complicity with the Nazi regime, causing her to break off contact for several years, during which time he married. Over the course of their romantic entanglement during 1948-51 Bachmann and Celan spent little time in physical proximity, but they evidently had enduring feelings for each other and were in touch regularly after meeting by chance again in 1957 until just before Celan’s death by suicide in 1970.

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books (a mix of fiction and non-fiction), 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Artists:

Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele

Film/TV:

The Dreamed Ones (2016)

November-December 2023 Wrap-Up and Reading Plans

November didn’t pan out as expected and I didn’t participate in all the lovely November challenges as I’d wished. This was partly as my dad’s very ill, so I’ve been travelling back and forth a bit. And it was partly – in stark contrast – as I had an old schoolfriend (we met in 1985) to stay for three nights (a highlight of which was going to see comedy at the Banana Cabaret), as well as general catching up on other social things, including a Soho bar crawl for my husband’s birthday – pic is of the interior of the very cool Soma.

I did a few other cultural things in November, and read a few books. Favourite film of the month was UK release Saltburn, although it has divided critics. It combines parody and moments of high comedy (Richard E. Grant is brilliant) with the darkest of plots. I probably don’t need to give a synopsis of this film, as, where I live in the UK at least, it is everywhere. Here’s a trailer though – since I’m a sucker for shallow glamour and a surface veneer, it gives me goosebumps.

I didn’t go to Oxbridge for university, but I did move south to London (where I’ve stayed ever since), and I met more than my fair share of glossy posh boys like Felix Catton (played with impeccable English accent and mannerisms by the Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who is also playing Elvis in upcoming movie Priscilla).

We also streamed at home dodgy US horror film Meghan and the much better, enigmatic Netflix release The Killer, and I went to the cinema to see the intriguing French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.

I snuck in reviews late last month of new Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s A Shining and Stefan Zweig’s Austrian classic The World of Yesterday. I also loved the audio book of Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo, mainly because of the amazing delivery by narrator James Goode. Other reads were The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Conde (for book club), the recently published memoir alcohol/grief memoir This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (I didn’t like this one – it lost me with one bizarre coincidence too many) and a weird Austrian novel of subverted desire and grubby stifled perversions, The Piano Teacher by Nobel winner Elfriede Jelinek.

And here is my reading list for December:

  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh – lots of critics have compared Saltburn with Brideshead, so I thought I would read it. Then Goodreads tells me I already read it in 2000 and gave it just two stars! So let’s see what I make of it now, after 23 years and having developed an unhealthily nostalgic streak (impulse book shop purchase while seeking out and taking stealthy pics of my husband’s newly published book Gin: A Tasting Course – which is the perfect Christmas book for the gin lover in your life!)
  • The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth – continuing my deep dive into Austrian lit with this 20th century classic (library)
  • In the Night of Time by Antonia Munoz Molina – Spanish novel nominated this month by the World Book Club on the BBC’s World Service (library)
  • The View from Down Here by Lucy Webster – newly published angry memoir and polemic by a UK writer with cerebral palsy (library)
  • Julia by Sandra Newman – there’s a fashion at the moment for revisionist story-telling/biography from the female perspective, but having loved Newman’s time-twisting novel The Heavens, as well as Orwell’s 1984, I feel I’m guaranteed to like this one (library)
  • Possession by A S Byatt – nominated by my book club at our November get-together, in light of the author’s death (own copy, has been in my TBR piles for years)
  • The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins – seems an appropriately wintery read (newly found in a charity book sale at my daughter’s riding school)
  • Return to Vienna: A Journal by Hilde Spiel – bought second-hand in English translation after Marina Sofia recommended this writer on her blog. As it details the writer’s return to Vienna after WW2 it seemed to follow on naturally from Zweig’s memoir (new online purchase)

Other Book Purchases during November and added to the ever-expanding TBR piles:

Quackery: A Brief History of How to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang (bought during a visit with my daughter to a cool museum near the Shard called the Old Operating Theatre);

Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin and One Photo A Day Keeps the Doctor Away by Joost Joossen, acquired during an after-work trip to Tate Modern to see the Philip Guston show;

The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir (impulse buy at the railway station on my way to my mum’s).

The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European by Stefan Zweig (Austria – #Germanlitmonth)

Translated from German by Anthea Bell

“This is, in short, a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942.” – Nicholas Lezard

Legendary Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, and his life straddled peacetime under the seemingly immutable Habsburg monarchy, and life during the First World War, the interwar period, and much of the Second World War, towards the end of which he and his wife took their own lives.

“In hardly any other European city was the urge towards culture as passionate as in Vienna.”

Zweig was born into a wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish family, and his reflections on his comfortable, intellectually stimulating childhood are full of a bitter nostalgia. He repeatedly writes of the “lighthearted” and optimistic nature of pre-1914 Vienna. Early in the book he contrasts the steady, predictable course of the lives of his parents and grandparents with the lives of his own generation of Austrian Jews:

“We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to
the end and obliged to begin again … we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security,
a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always
new in every fibre.”

The book provides a historical overview of the life at end of the 19th century and in the first part of the 20th
century in Austria, as well as a detailed cultural history, as Zweig name-drops the actors, composers,
politicians, writers and other significant figures that he met, some of whom remain well known to this day, and others who have dropped off the radar, despite Zweig’s conviction that their work could not fail to endure.

From the vantage point of around 1940, he writes that the Austrian people entered the First World War in 1914 in a state of childish naivety, which by 1939 had been overtaken by cynicism, and which had destroyed trust in their leaders.

“If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release”

War for Zweig was the result of an inevitable, cyclical drive towards conflict, akin to Freud’s idea of the death drive – and an unsettling idea amid the current intense global instability and the rise of populist leaders. Perhaps this is the book’s power – while vividly recreating a lost era, it continues to resonate in the present, where it can be easy to assume that the status quo is immune from disruption.

Zweig records how the population was unprepared for Hitler’s later rise, sticking to their daily routines and living in a state of denial, even while “the underground cracks and crevices between the classes and the races, which the age of conciliation had so laboriously patched up” tore open.

Achieving great success from a young age in his literary endeavours, Zweig suffered immeasurably at the hands of the Nazis, and bemoaned the destruction wrought on society by them, although he would have been unaware at the time of his death of the extent of the horror that was to be revealed by the end of the war. At the time of Zweig’s death his work was no longer considered publishable in his home nation, where people who he had counted as friends had turned away from him in the street, and he had ultimately been rendered stateless. Nationalism, he writes in the foreword, is the “ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture”.

I seem driven to wartime memoirs, having read and been gripped by many: Judith Kerr’s classic
trilogy of her life as a refugee from Nazi Germany; Vera Britton’s classic first world war memoir Testament of Youth; Ariana Neumann’s When Time Stopped; an Sierra Leonean account of life as child soldier, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone. Perhaps these accounts are so compelling because, as Zweig notes at the end of his book: “in the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives”.

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books, 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Artists:

Book review: A Shining (Kvitleik) by Jon Fosse (Norway)

Translated by Damion Searls

I’m back after a long absence from the blog which I can put down to many things: my dad being very ill, overwork, endless building work, a barely functional non-work computer, usual family demands, and a dose of general inertia.

In the summer I signed up for a four-book fiction subscription with prize-grabbing publisher Fitzcarraldo and their distinctive oh-so-stylish blue and white covers. After Mild Vertigo by Japanese author Meiko Kanai (it was ok) came A Shining by the Norwegian Jon Fosse, newly published in English and sitting conveniently on my bookshelf at the very moment he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in early October. I’d not read any of his work. Didn’t know he was a prolific playwright and hadn’t read his multi-volume magnum opus Septology (it sounded hard).

A Shining is short, a short story in book form (I think at under 50 pages it’s too short to properly count as a novella, but I’m slipping it in just before the end of Cathy’s Novellas in November event nevertheless). A man, a bit listless (maybe depressed – he mentions not eating properly in days), sets off in his car, with no clear route in mind. He drives randomly right, then left, before getting stuck at the end of a forest road. He can’t figure out how to get his car out, he can’t turn it round, and he can’t reverse out; he sits for a while with the heater on, then for some reason gets out and ventures off into the forest, even as it begins to get dark and to snow heavily. It begins to feel like a fable. The man becomes disorientated and cold, but slowly becomes aware of a mysterious presence: “luminous in its whiteness, shining from within”, as well as encountering his parents along the way, who act in a matter-of-fact way, albeit with somewhat dreamlike logic.

I was unclear whether this was a spiritual redemption tale, of a man lost both figuratively and literally who finds enlightenment in his journey through the forest, or conversely an unsettling story of a man with depression somewhat passively attempting suicide and gradually succumbing to the symptoms of hypothermia. Redemption or tragedy – you decide! I’m certainly interested now to read more of Fosse’s work – people rave about his Septology sequence in a cultish way.

It reminded me of other books, but not in a derivative way: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for the sense of artistry in repetition and inertia, fellow Norwegian Hanne Ørstavik’s Love for the sense of crisis in the cold and Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes for its misguided lonely protagonist.


Bruno Bettelheim: The forest “signifies a psychoanalytic space – a place separated from
everyday experience in which to be lost is to be found”


Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country 5 books, 5 films/TV, an artist or artists, TV, food, music)
NORWAY
Books:

Films:

Artist:

Book review: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (France)

Translated by Daniel Levin Becker

Published by the stylish Fitzcarraldo, and longlisted for the 2023 International Booker prize, The Birthday Party (published in French in 2020 as Histoires de la Nuit) takes its time in going places.

Set over the course of a single day in the small French hamlet of Three Lone Girls, preparations are under way for Marion’s low-key 40th birthday celebrations. She lives on a quiet farm with her husband Patrice and their daughter Ida. Their marriage has some issues, and both Marion and Patrice are keeping secrets from each other. Next door lives Christine, an ageing artist who lives alone, gets on well with Patrice and is very fond of Ida, often providing informal childcare after school. Then a stranger arrives at Christine’s door.

The Birthday Party is a long book, at around 500 pages, with labyrinthine sentences, and it took me a while to get into it. French writers tend not to use 10 words if they can say it with 50. I had to slow my reading right down, and consciously make a point of taking my time with this novel.

The tension gradually ratchets up, however, and the book became a real page-turner. A multiple-perspective home invasion novel that is a work of literary fiction, this is nothing like a Linwood Barclay novel. I’m so fond of Fitzcarraldo novels that I’ve recently signed up for a four-book fiction subscription so I don’t miss any (they also publish non-fiction, and I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of their essays).

Book review: Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev (Russia)

Translated by Michael Henry Heim

Novel with Cocaine was published in Paris in 1934 by a Russian journal-in-exile, under the pseudonym M. Ageyev, and translated into English in 1984. It is book 11 of my 20 books of summer (I won’t manage to review them all). There was some speculation that it was secretly authored by Nabokov, though that appears to have been de-bunked. Nabokov himself described the book as ‘decadent and disgusting’.

The translation that I read seems to be out of print, but I picked up a secondhand copy on Amazon, where it is billed as “the story of an adolescent’s cocaine addiction”, although actually cocaine doesn’t feature until at least three-quarters the way through the book. There is a later translation by Hugh Aplin that maintains the double meaning in the original Russian title: ‘Romance with Cocaine‘.

The book follows its bad-boy protagonist, Vadim Maslennikov, through his final year of education and beyond, opening when he is approaching 17, and a prospective future lawyer.

He tries to act the dandy, though his mother is close to poverty, and cannot afford to subsidise his louche lifestyle after paying for his food and education. He behaves appallingly to his mother, and towards girls and women in general, living at the mercy of his sexual desires: ‘no matter where I was – on a tram, in a cafe, at the theatre, in a restaurant, in the street, anywhere and everywhere – I had only to glance at a woman’s figure, not her face but the seductive fullness of delicacy of her thighs, to picture myself dragging her to a bed, a bench, even a gateway, without so much as a word of introduction‘. He is sneering towards paid sex workers, and roams the streets for girls to impress with, for example, sleigh rides he can ill-afford, before seducing and then abandoning them.

After leaving school, Vadim falls briefly in love with an older woman, but the relationship is doomed and he soon experiments with cocaine, immediately finding solace in drug use and becoming obsessed with getting hold of his next hit. His all-consuming love and obsession is for the drug, and he follows his warped philosophizing as his life is taken over by drug use: ‘During the long nights and days I spent under the influence of cocaine in Yag’s room I came to see that what counts in life is not the events that surround one but the reflection of those events in one’s consciousness…’.

Billed as metaphor for the ‘violent purification’ of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, I’m afraid my Russian history is very rusty and any such analogy went entirely over my head. But it works as a damning account of disenfranchised youth.

Book review: The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair (1863-1946, England)

This is book 10 of my 20 books of summer (hmm, maybe I should have gone for 10!) and a novella from 1922 that I would never have come across if it wasn’t for that pesky 1001 books list. It is a really quick read, which I had expected to find a bit dour and old-fashioned, but which I actually loved.

A contemporary of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, Sinclair is an early modernist writer and critic, and a pioneer of the ‘stream of consciousness’ style of writing, but has tended to fly under the radar.

The book (published by Virago) opens with Harriett a much-cossetted baby, and across 15 elliptical chapters her life is shown to us in chronological snapshots. Harriett’s early life is loving but very sheltered, spot-lit by a single act of rebellion when she sneaks out of the family’s orchard garden and ventures down the path to where “you came to the waste ground covered with old boots and rusted, crumpled tins. The little dirty brown house stood there behind the rickety palings; narrow, like the piece of a house that has been cut in two. It hid, stooping under the ivy bush on its roof. It was not like the houses people live in; there was something queer, some secret, frightening thing about it“. When a man emerges from the house, Harriett does an about-turn and retreats home, filled with dread.

Harriett is chastised for having broken her parents’ trust, but not punished. Her father sums up the family’s expectations of Harriett: “Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden. We don’t forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave beautifully…”

Thus Harriett is characterized by her obedience, a ‘good girl’, effectively trained to prioritize other people’s needs over her own from birth to death, and to present herself as she feels other people would wish to perceive her.

Her behaviour is always impeccable (though inwardly, as her life progresses, she is increasingly critical of the appearance and perceived failings of those around her). She plods through an awful lot of improving literature, to no particular end (though so, I realize, do I). She idolises her father, though he turns out to be a poor, even feckless, businessman; her announcement, on meeting new acquaintances, that “my father was Milton Frean” increasingly inspires bemusement (who he?) than respect. Her greatest moral quandary comes when she falls in love with the fiancé of her best friend, Priscilla, but feels compelled to deny her feelings, and thus her one opportunity for marriage. Sinclair’s prose, meanwhile is devastating in its simplicity: “The years passed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriett was now fifty“. Tell me about it.

By kowtowing to her father, refusing ever to be selfish and putting her mother’s (assumed) needs above her own, effectively dedicating herself to self-sacrifice, Harriett ends up watching her life flow through her fingers. She deviates from this course only once, when, entitled and peevish as she ages, she dismisses her maid when she has a baby, only taking her back when the child has tragically died.

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is essentially a highly readable criticism of 19th century assumptions about middle-class womanhood, and a treatise against people-pleasing and self-effacement and for agency and boundaries. This small book packs a mighty punch, and should be required reading for all 16-year-olds.

Book review: The Bitch by Pilar Quintana (Colombia)

Translated by Lisa Dillman

Published as La Perra in 2017 in Spanish, and in English in 2020 by World Editions, this novella was a super-quick read that blew all my pre-conceptions out of the water. It is book 9 of my 20 books of summer.

The Title, The Bitch, made me think of a Jackie Collins novel from the 1990s (probably because I’m pretty sure I read the JC novel of the same name at that time!). But this is no sex and shopping novel.

Damaris lives in poverty on the Pacific coast of Colombia with her coarse fisherman husband. Their home is a wooden shack surrounded by jungle. A childhood tragedy still haunts Damaris, while she grieves her own lack of children. When she has the opportunity to take in an orphaned puppy, she jumps at the chance, naming the dog Chirli. But this is not the whimsical tale I had anticipated. The relationship between Damaris and the dog is often strained, the ungrateful pup tests her patience, and a monstruous part of both personalities sometimes comes to the fore.

The prose is terse, and the setting is elemental, with the implacable sea and the thick jungle a source of constant threat. The book’s conclusion, when it comes, is shocking, unexpected, but somehow right. In the blurb on the back cover, the Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera sums up the novel perfectly when he writes: “Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn’t know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them.”

The Bitch was the winner of an English PEN Award.

Book Review: Purge by Sofi Oksanen (Estonia)

Translated by Lola Rogers

Purge is book 8 of my 20 books of summer, written by novelist and playwright Sofi Oksanen (and developed from her own play). Published in 2008, and a bestseller in both Finland and Estonia, it is a book that I’ve had sitting on my Kindle since 2011, so frankly it is a small miracle that I finally got to it! I saw that it was a pick on the BBC World Service’s ‘World Book Club’, which I’m very fond of, and that helped give me the motivation to give it another try, after a brief attempt to get into it in a dentist’s waiting room circa 2014.

Oksanen was born and raised in Finland, but her Estonian mother grew up under the Soviet occupation, which shapes the subject matter of the book. This is a really dark novel, although I had assumed it would be a straightforward ‘murdered woman’ police procedural, and it is much more interesting than that.

The novel comprises short chapters, on multiple timelines, and follows the experiences of two women from different generations, one from Estonia and one from Russia, whose lives intersect. Through key events in their lives, the novel explores the brutal human cost of Estonia’s 20th century history during the Soviet (and briefly Nazi) occupation that lasted until the beginning of the 1990s, and the criminality that emerged during the early years of the transition to capitalism following the collapse of the USSR.

Initially I found the timeline tricky, perhaps because of reading it on Kindle (I kind of hate my Kindle and the whole Kindle experience – give me a real book, with pages), and might have struggled a little more if I hadn’t already known something of Estonia’s history and the rough dates of occupation and independence.

The book opens in 1992, when an ageing, lonely Estonian woman, Aliide, looks out of her window one morning to find a young woman lying on the grass outside, possibly wounded, or even dead. When she brings the girl, Zara, inside, it gradually becomes clear that she is fleeing a violent criminal group trafficking Russian women for sex, with whom she has become embroiled seeking opportunity, not least the money for the newly available, highly covetable Western products.

To Aliide’s consternation, however, it turns out that the two women’ stories are linked, and when Zara reveals a photograph, in Part 2 of the novel we are thrown back in time to the 1940s and Aliide’s story.

During the 1940s Aliide, her sister Ingel and Ingel’s handsome husband Hans lived in the Estonian forestland. Aliide is hopelessly attracted to Hans, and when the Russian occupation comes and anti-communist saboteurs like Hans are rounded up, Aliide and Ingel do everything they can to protect him and Linda, his daughter with Ingel. They even construct a secret room within the house to keep him safe.

Consequently, Aliide and her sister are brutally interrogated and sexually assaulted but they do not reveal Hans’s whereabouts, swearing that he is dead. Nevertheless, Aliide is traumatized and living in constant fear, and she marries horrible communist enforcer Martin (whose sweat stinks of onions and who calls Aliide his ‘little mushroom’). Ultimately she feels she must weigh the lives of those closest to her against her own security.

In exploring the hardships that lead Aliide and Zara to the point at which their lives intersect, the book helps to humanize the impossible decisions people lacking agency were forced to make under (and at the end of) the Soviet regime. This resonates more than ever while Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine, and with reports of the forcible deportation and ‘assimilation’ of Ukrainian children.

The novel has received several prizes, including the Finlandia Prize in 2008 and the Prix Femina in 2010. It’s not my normal sort of read, and its grimness means it’s not an ‘enjoyable’ read, but it was insightful and seamily fascinating.

Book review: A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi (Algeria)

Translated by Chris Andrews

This is one of the books that I chose at random off the first shelf at my local library, in the hope of finding a hidden gem, and the seventh of my 20 books of summer 2023 (a popular challenge that is hosted each year by Cathy – except this year I keep reading other books that I don’t feel like reviewing instead of the list I carefully curated!).

A Bookshop in Algiers by Algerian-born writer Kaouther Adimi is about the literary history of Algeria and about a real-life (now defunct) bookshop, Les Vraies Richesses, opened by Edmond Charlot in 1936, which briefly formed a key part of the cultural milieu of Algiers. The short novel follows the fortunes of the shop where Albert Camus launched his first book, through decades of war, revolution and Algeria’s independence from France; the extent of the atrocities carried out by France is not skipped over, and these bits were quite shocking.

The book was nominated for the Prix Goncourt in France, where it was first published in 2017, before appearing in English translation in 2020. It is certainly well-researched: there are three pages of sources listed in a bibliography at the back. However, a significant chunk of the narrative has been directly informed by books of interviews with Charlot, which have been used to inspire large sections comprising lightly fictionalized diary entries. These do not wear their research lightly: I can only describe them as turgid, and they reminded me a bit of a Year 11 history project: I would have been delighted to have seen a bit more embellishment in these sections, to at least wake up the prose a bit.

The diary entries are interspersed with other elements set in the present-day, when a young man, Ryad, with little interest in books, has been commissioned to clear out the contents of the old bookshop. There is less exposition here, and these parts were more enjoyable, if fairly terse.

What is really great though is that a little-known part of Algerian literary history has been able to reach the notice of a wider audience through the publication of this story.