The Honor of the Tribe

Some years after the Algerian revolution of the early '60s, a poor village--perhaps to expiate past sins--slides into modernity and ruin, compelled by the vengeful assault of an alienated former inhabitant. Omar El Mabrouk, appointed prefect by the central administration, arrives in the village of his birth one day seething with a pestilent resentment, blaspheming Islam and hurling promises of wealth and ease in the tone of malevolent insults. A distant and apparently indifferent bureaucracy fosters his cyclonic energy, and from the outset it is clear that the hamlet will not survive. This disturbing tale is much deepened by the manner of its telling. A silent and anonymous interviewer records the recollections of an equally anonymous old man, one of the ``few survivors among us,'' whose narrative, twining history with fable, dips forward, backward, and into itself with the ease of authentic oral tradition. The Algerian author, whose previous books have been published in French, presents the evils, hypocrisies and sexual mores of the doomed village--and their resonance throughout conservative Islam--with no more than the merest breath of irony, and never allows us to find these values, or the community holding them, merely quaint. (July)