Novel
Nedjma
Kateb Yacine · 1956
Synopsis
In eastern Algeria at the end of the forties, four young men bound by blood and by the city of Constantine, Lakhdar, Mourad, Mustapha and Rachid, work on a building site. Lakhdar strikes the foreman and goes back to prison, as after the demonstrations of May 1945. All four are in love with Nedjma, daughter of a Frenchwoman and an Algerian, married to a man she does not love, whose origin is lost in the lying or feverish tales of old Si Mokhtar. The narrative turns and retraces its steps, back to the ancestors of the tribe.
Context
Le Seuil published the novel in 1956, in the midst of the war of independence, preceding it with a publisher's warning which cautiously offers a summary and landmarks so as not to yield to the vertigo of its spirals. The author would later recall a publisher who advised him instead to write about the sheep of his country. Critics have read the book as a response to Camus's L'Étranger, and as an epic of the ancestors that runs through Roman Numidia, the Ottoman Empire and the French conquest. Richard Howard translated it into English as early as 1961.
Who it is for
A difficult novel, in French, with no chronology and no stable narrator. One has to accept not placing everything on a first reading.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a masterpiece of North African literature and as a founding text of modern Algerian identity.