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Boualem Sansal was born in 1949 in Algeria. Once a government official, he lost his post over criticism of Islamist policies. His first novel, published when he was fifty years old, won the Best First Novel Prize in France, and Sansal was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2011. He has previously been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Sansal's books have been translated into fifteen languages, but The German Mujahid was his first to be translated into English, also by Frank Wynne (published in the UK as An Unfinished Business). He has called Harraga his best novel. Sansal's writings are banned in Algeria, where he continues to live with his family.
Frank Wynne's many translations have won the IMPAC, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize. He lives in London.
Frank Wynne is a writer and award-winning literary translator. Born in Ireland he has lived and worked in Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Buenos Aires and currently lives in San José, Costa Rica. He has translated more than a dozen major novels, among them the works of Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Pierre Mérot and the Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma. A journalist and broadcaster, he has written for the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Irish Times, Melody Maker, and Time Out.
Harraga: A Novel
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$17.99
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ISBN-13:
9781620402269
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Publication date: 01/13/2015
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 288
- File size: 2 MB
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Harraga. The term means "to burn," and it refers to those Algerians in exile, who burn their identity papers to seek asylum in Europe. But for Boualem Sansal, whose novels are banned in his own country, there is a kind of internal exile even for those who stay; and for no one is it worse than for the country's women.
Lamia is thirty-five years old, a doctor. Having lost most of her family, she is accustomed to living alone, unmarried and contentedly independent when a teenage girl, Chérifa, arrives on her doorstep. Chérifa is pregnant by Lamia's brother in exile -- Lamia's first indication since he left that he is alive -- and she'll surely be killed if she returns to her parents. Lamia grudgingly offers her hospitality; Chérifa ungratefully accepts it. But she is restless and obstinate, and before long she runs away, out into the hostile streets -- leaving Lamia to track her, fearing for the life of the girl she has come, improbably, to love as family.
Boualem Sansal creates, in Lamia, an incredible narrator: cultured, caustic, and compassionate, with an ironic contempt for the government, she is utterly convincing. With his deceptively simple story, Sansal delivers a brave indictment of fundamentalism that is also warm and wonderfully humane.
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Publishers Weekly
10/13/2014Sansal’s (The German Mujahid) latest novel is a fiercely critical indictment of Islamic fundamentalism and a corrupt Algerian government. According to Sansal, harraga means “path burner” in Arabic and is the name given to hopeful emigrants who burn bridges and identification papers to seek better lives overseas. Lamia, a pediatrician and “confirmed spinster” at 35, is a vocal critic of the strictures of Islam and the prevailing political regime. One day, she opens the door of her rickety old house in Rampe Valée to Chérifa, an unmarried, pregnant, charismatic teen with perfume that penetrates the air like radiation. Both are path burners of a different kind, with their open defiance of religious and cultural norms. Chérifa claims to know Lamia’s missing harraga brother, Sofiane, and the two women strike up a warm yet precarious friendship. Simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking, Sansal expertly describes the crushing weight of social and religious strictures on Algeria’s women. (Jan.)
Kirkus Reviews
2014-08-27Two women, a pediatrician considered a spinster at 35 and a spontaneous, pregnant teenager, forge a strong, unlikely emotional bond after a short time living together in a 17th-century house in Rampe Valée, a crumbling neighborhood in contemporary Algiers. Sansal's (An Unfinished Business, 2011, etc.) second book to appear in English is as much a visceral meditation on time passing under shifting forms of ownership, empire and control as it is the story of women adjusting to unexpected motherhood. Lamia, an insatiable reader, takes Chérifa, an illiterate 17-year-old on the run from fundamentalists in rural Oran, into her city home. Both are independent sparks, at odds with Algeria's economically depressed and emotionally repressive landscape. At first, Lamia's connection to Chérifa is based solely on her desire to find her younger brother Sofiane, who last called mysteriously from Oran. Sofiane, too, is a runaway—but he is a path burner or harraga, desperate enough to burn his identity paperwork and undertake an often deadly journey via desert and water to begin again in Europe without a past. "Nothing is more relative than the origin of things," Lamia says of her house's pedigree before her Muslim family arrived from the mountains. A woman who lives in her imagination because the exterior world is inaccessible, unappealing and dangerous, she believes she will be the last person to live in the house as it falls into ruin. Nightmares grow like weeds in her mind. To cope with these, "I have active and passive moods and switch between the two as the whim takes me," she says. This partially explains the uneven plotting and pacing. What Lamia does have is satellite TV, enabling riffs on Muslims abroad and the film Not Without My Daughter. Sansal's richly drawn characters and the places where he embeds them will color readers' moods long after we leave their passageways.