October 13, 2014
Sansal’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.
September 15, 2014
Two 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 Valee, 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 Cherifa, 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 Cherifa 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.
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November 1, 2014
Her family all dead or gone, Lamia, a thirtysomething pediatrician, lives alone in the family's crumbling mansion in Algiers. To her door one day comes a pregnant 16-year-old girl named Ch'rifa, claiming the baby's father is Lamia's younger brother, Sofiane, who is a harraga, one of those whounable to make a living in Algeriahas become an undocumented alien, hoping to find a new life in Europe. It soon becomes obvious that he is not the father, but Lamia takes the girl in, nevertheless, and soon begins to love her as a daughter or younger sister. Then one day the headstrong, footloose girl vanishes, taking Lamia's heart with her. What has happened to the girl? Frustrated by bureaucracy, the strong-minded, independent Lamia determines to find Ch'rifa herself. Meanwhile her intemperate comments about government and those she calls the Islamists put her in jeopardy. Though occasionally slow-paced and discursive, Sansal's latest novel offers Westerners a scathing, insider's look at the failings and frustrations of life in modern Algeria, where his workfor obvious reasonsis banned.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)