This is the 80th book by the writer, Abdelhak Najib. A collection of short stories that deal with love, friendship, hope, human illusions, desert crossings, human wanderings, betrayals, this bad comedy called existence. A scathing and uncompromising work.
This is a new exercise in style that the writer and journalist Abdelhak Najib offers us here, in “The Kiss of Judas”. After the novel, with unmissable successes, such as “The Territories of God (5 editions), “The Spring of Falling Leaves”, “Death is not a new sun”, “The Last War of the Unknown Soldier” and the epic novel entitled: “The Labyrinth of the Archangel”, it is the short story that comes to grab us like an epiphany.
We are here faced with a series of texts of surgical precision. First, the word, the verb, the phrastic construction, which goes to the essential, which does not yield in any way to flourishes. The subject is carried by a strong, incisive, cutting language. All, underpinned by a linguistic poetry of which the author has the secret and which we find in all his work, from poetry to the novel, passing through philosophy of which the writer has already given us at least thirty books.
The situations that carry all the stories in this collection are of a profound humanity. Faithful to these concerns of a thinker very close to the realities and ramifications of the human soul, Abdelhak Najib scrutinizes the unsaid, with such mastery, by suggesting, without ever revealing or giving in to the acquired and the gratuitous: “Nothing is described so well as that which is barely known. We only discover what we do not know”, wrote Paul Éluard. And this is exactly what we touch on when reading these stories.
For example, when we read a short story about the relationship between a man and a woman, we are faced with unknown territories. Nothing of what one can usually read, in a romance narrative. Here, what inhabits the writer are the things that remain pending, the silences full of meaning, the aborted expectations, the sketches that remain scattered on the dial of the days, the silent emotions and the complex feelings of which we can only glimpse the fallible appearances. Love, this strange and fleeting feeling, is never delivered in a block or as one might expect it.
Love carries within it the seeds that can disguise it, make it impossible, or even finish it. And everything is said by suggesting, by alluding, to avoid the illusion of words that sometimes say the opposite of what they are supposed to make us see. It is the same force when we read a short story about friendship. The author never judges or decides.
The point is elsewhere. It lets us slide into the interstices of the complexities of human geographies, with their crests and their deep crevices. And it is there, at the bottom of the abyss, that we must perhaps seek out this ray of light that can bring a true friendship between two human beings to life. To illustrate my point regarding the language that carries all these texts in this collection, this sentence by Henri Bergson comes to mind: “The art of the writer consists above all in making us forget that he uses words.” And it is exactly this feeling that takes hold of us from the first word to the last. It is as if the author were using other words, which are certainly familiar to us, but which do not have the same scope.
This is touched upon in a story of implacable force that speaks of this man, who has crisscrossed the world in search of himself. He travels from one country to another, he gets lost here thinking that one day he might find himself there, he meets faces, he seeks the sine in the eyes of others, he wanders in the immensity of cities, in the midst of their noise of rusty scrap metal, and ends up realizing that existence is a pilgrimage, where the one who walks must peel himself, skin by skin, until he becomes light. Some can do it, others will never know, like the title of another work by Abdelhak Najib, which bears the very revealing title of “Many are called, few are chosen”.
And here, once again, what strikes us is the strength of the sentence in its dazzling simplicity. Abdelhak Najib writes in the simplest possible way, without ever forcing the lines, nor exaggerating the point, much less wanting to be stylish: “Here as elsewhere, I know, beauty is most of the time only simplicity”, as that dear Guillaume Apollinaire said. I insist on this simplicity, because it may seem that one can reproduce this same writing pattern. Except that it is not possible.
The sentence here carries its meaning and its unsaid things. And that is its great power. As we know, often the eye only sees what the brain is prepared to understand, that is why this writing goes against the expected and the predictable. It upsets. It strikes blows. It calls into question our certainties. In other words, when we close this volume of collection with a very symbolic title, we realize that only those who risk perhaps going too far will know how far it is possible to go.
The Kiss of Judas, Abdelhak Najib. Editions Orion. 260 pages. Available in bookstores.
