Novel · A way to begin
The Simple Past
Le Passé simple
Driss Chraïbi · 1954
Synopsis
Driss Ferdi, nineteen, a pupil at the French lycée, tells in the first person of a few days of his revolt against his father, Hajji Fatmi Ferdi, a wealthy tea merchant whom the whole household calls the Seigneur: a devout man quick to strike, who bends a fearful wife and many sons to his will. The young man rises up against him as he does against the colonial authorities, for whom he is nobody, without finding his place on either side. The book opens during Ramadan, the family waiting for a late son before breaking the fast.
Context
The novel appeared in 1954, two years before the end of the protectorate, with an epigraph dedicated to François Mauriac. Its five parts bear titles borrowed from chemistry, from the reagent to the catalyst, and its writing proceeds by breaks in time and point of view, in the manner of Faulkner, whose influence the author acknowledged. Moroccan readers saw in it a betrayal of the struggle for independence, and conservatives attacked it on both sides of the Mediterranean; according to Adam Shatz, the book remained banned in Morocco until 1977.
Who it is for
A novel written in the first person, in a jarring, brutal style that is part of its point; available in paperback from Folio.
Prizes and reception
Tahar Ben Jelloun regards it as just as important, for Maghreb writers, as Camus's L'Étranger; translated into English by Hugh A. Harter.
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