Ô María by Anouar Benmalek

Abstract

I, political astuteness, wisdom, and 1 human compassion behind her. In , Die Braut aus Byzanz, Gabrielle Ali 1 oth has painted an intriguing pic i ture of her subject and has brought ' the tenthcentury alive, i Irmgard Hunt I Colorado StateUniversity 1 Greet Andringa. Libben reach. Ljou i wert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2008. [ 256 pages. 17.50. isbn 978-90-330 ! 0669-2 i In 2003 Greet Andringa made her , debut as a Frisian writer with her 1 volume of short stories, De diggels 1 fan Che, to critical acclaim. Libben 1 reach (Life's cobwebs) marks her 1 debut as a novelist. [ The author's firstnovel is an 1 ambitious one. In it, Andringa has , the main character, Geeske, search 1 ing through three generations of , theWiggersma family in a quest 1 for greater self-understanding. It is 1 prompted by her own shocking act I of apparent violence to her little 1 daughter: in an impulsive reaction , to her child's egregious misbehav 1 ior,she gives the child a push down , the stairs that lands the child, coma 1 tose, in the IC unit of thehospital. 1 With time, the little girl recovers, 1 but mother Geeske's recovery from 1 an attack of self-loathing becomes I a long-termprocess. Devastated by 1 what she has done, she stops by the , mirror: "I don't have a moth-eaten 1 bare skull, no flickeringgreen light , in the eyes. . . .This monster looks 1 completely normal and is precisely 1 therefore so repulsive. . . . Nothing ' changes and everything changes: it 1 becomes a formless gray swamp in , which you lose your way. I don't 1 know her anymore who stares at me , in the mirror." The quest to recover the self she is losing takes Geeske from the sticky cobwebs of her own life into those wound around the lives of grandparents, parents, and cousins: lives tainted and broken with extreme political leanings and prejudices, sexual assault, promis cuity, marital tensions, depression, nervous breakdowns, conflicts, and the postmodern malaise of Geeske's own psychic anxiety. Geeske finds not somuch a healing of her own broken self as a revelation that the suffocating cobweb of living has entrapped them all. Needing escape, in the end she discovers that there isno good escape. Within the constraints of the human condi tion, however, there is still love, whose strands are thicker than the cobwebs, as well as acceptance, and with acceptance a maturity and peace thathad eluded her. Andringa decided to cast this search in the formof fragments,the fragmentsofGeeske's own lifeand the lives around her, a collage of fragments that cumulatively yield a truthabout living.Thus the literary form simulates the human search for insight.But here itcomes at the expense of some aesthetic delight. Though the writer's artfuluse of lan guage is impressive, the constantly shiftingpoints of view, characters, times, and locales impose consider able strain on the reader's focus and understanding. Pity especially the reader who doesn't discover until theend thatthere isa helpful family chart in theback of thebook. Then, too, the reader experiences the story more as a kind of psychological dis section rather than a humanizing process of revelation and under standing, though the latter seems clearly to have been the author's intention. Still, thoughwe may turnaway with the book's cobwebs clogging our own brain, we may also find ourselves shifting our attention to our own family's web of relation ships, tensions, and enigmas. That's not a bad accomplishment. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Anouar Benmalek. ? Maria. Paris. Librairie Generale Francaise / Fayard. 2008 (?2006). 477 pages. 6.95. isbn 978-2-253-12269-2 In the late 1980s Anouar Ben malek?mathematician, poet, and gadfly journalist?led an unprec edented campaign to abolish torture inhis native Algeria. In French exile since 1992,he has explored forgotten crimes against humanity in a series of provocative, poetic, and gory nov els: Algeria's 1990s dirtywar in the award-winning The Lovers of Algeria, genocide in nineteenth-century Tas mania in Child of an Ancient People, and thebitter end ofMuslim Spain in? Maria. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492...