EDITORIAL – By summoning the memory of the terrible Algerian civil war, “Houris” reaches a scale that certainly goes beyond literature. It is this ambition that the Goncourt jury wanted to distinguish.
The Goncourt prize list is no longer to be praised: yesterday Malraux, Proust, Gary. Today Makine or Houellebecq, few great novelists have escaped the sagacity of this circle. With Kamel Daoud, the jurors reward more than a writer. There is certainly Hourisa volume which is composed like the great novel of the dark decade. But there is also a personality whose voice carries far: for years, Daoud has spoken and written freely about society and power. He regularly points out the growing gap between them. His audience but also his audacity led him to leave Oran, where vexations were multiplying, to settle in France.
Just recently, the publisher Gallimard was banned from entering the Algiers Book Fair, for no stated reason. No need to be a great cleric to see a link with the publication of Houriswhich its sole subject condemns to be doomed to illegality. Houris is a voluminous and ambitious novel: the narrator…
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