Zabor ou Les psaumes by Kamel Daoud

Abstract

married, Tomás’s schooling will take him to Oxford for a doctoral degree in foreign languages. A stellar student, whose learning of Spanish and English began naturally at home in Madrid, Tomás soon becomes an admired polyglot by his professors at Oxford. Upon graduation, because of his great ability to speak many languages and imitate many accents, he is recruited by the British secret service and thus begins his life as an underground agent. As is the case with many of Marías’s protagonists, Tomás, or Tom, is an individual of many identities. Truly multicultural and multilingual, he can claim more than one place of belonging while also being perfectly capable of feeling at ease in more than one cultural setting. Such a trait proves to be useful for his job, although he is never free to reveal his many identities or his whereabouts to his wife; instead, he is forced to create many masks for himself in order to justify his long periods away from home. As a result, identity and deceit take center stage in this narrative along with other recurring topics in Marías’s fiction. Case in point are the trials and tribulations of love and marriage and, more importantly, the hidden secrets each individual carries during his or her lifetime. At the same time, Berta Isla is a subtle reflection on the nature of fiction and the novel’s ability to serve as a tool to explore the many nuances of human nature. Marías’s intense, sentimentally charged narrative seems to underscore that only the art of the novel is capable of making visible facets of the human condition that seem invisible to the common eye. Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires. An ambitious work filled with mysterious and sublime moments, Berta Isla is a rich and complex novel and can be regarded as some of Javier Marías’s best storytelling to date. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Kamel Daoud Zabor ou Les psaumes Arles, France. Actes Sud. 2017. 328 pages. “Writing is the only effective ruse against death. People have tried prayer, drugs, magic, endelessly repeated verses, or immobility, but I believe I am the only one who found an answer: writing.” Thus begins Kamel Daoud’s second novel, Zabor ou Les psaumes, in which a social outcast in an isolated village finds his purpose in life by staving off other people’s deaths through his writing. After years of being shunned by his father and his half-brothers, Zabor finds himself at the center of a family drama when his father is sick and dying. Should he try to save the father who long ago repudiated his mother and banished Zabor to an isolated house? Should he use his skill as a writer to help those who despise him and the texts he produces? This allegorical novel draws on several sources, including One Thousand and One Nights, with storytelling as both a framing device and a temporary respite from decay and death. Throughout the narrative, numerous flashbacks allow Zabor, the pathetic and strangely misshapen son, who brought only shame to his father, to tell both his story and that of his family: his father the prosperous butcher, with his flocks of sheep; his repudiated (and now dead) mother; the unmarried aunt who shares his status as an outcast; and his half-brothers, who long to take over the dying father’s business. Zabor mostly spends his days sleeping and his nights roaming the village. Occasionally, he is called upon by neighbors who normally avoid him to write a story that will delay the death of a family member. Useless as a worker, unable to marry and have children, Zabor’s only interests seem to be collecting books and writing texts that are incomprehensible to most of the villagers. Normally, they only treat Zabor with pity or disgust, unless of course they need his seemingly magical writing skills, which have prolonged the lives of many. Kamel Daoud’s debut novel, Meursault, contre-enquête (Actes Sud, 2014), has a...