Narrative
Le Vieux de la montagne
Not translated into English
Habib Tengour · 1983
Synopsis
The Old Man of the Mountain: legend has it that three young men studied together at Nishapur, under the imam Mowaffak: Nizam al-Mulk, the future grand vizier, Hassan-i Sabbah, the future master of the Assassins entrenched at Alamut, and Omar Khayyam, mathematician and poet. The narrative follows their friendship and what undoes it: the ambition of one, the conquering faith of another, the poetic solitude of the third. A poet narrator constantly shifts these figures from medieval Persia to the Algeria of the 1980s and the Paris of the émigrés, where a street off the Ourcq canal leads to a district called Alamut.
Context
The text, written between 1977 and 1981 as its subtitle of relation indicates, was published by Sindbad in 1983. Critics have read in it an interrogation of the role of the intellectual in the face of power and a presentiment of the violence that was to strike Algeria: the Hassan of the book owes something to Khomeini. The author refuses to make it a historical novel and proceeds in fragments, between narrative, poem and dialogue. La Différence reissued it in 2008 in its paperback series, followed by a new text, Nuit avec Hassan.
Who it is for
A short text of about one hundred and twenty pages, in French, made of fragments and alternating voices. You should know that it assumes some familiarity with Omar Khayyam and the legend of the Assassins.
Prizes and reception
The book that established its author in the early eighties, and has since been the subject of several university studies.