3.5/5

This book is committed to a monumental undertaking, which is why I rounded up rather than down. In addition, I was nearly as bewildered by this as I was by [b:Women of Algiers in Their Apartment|301501|Women of Algiers in Their Apartment|Assia Djebar|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387750125s/301501.jpg|292565], which may be a result of this Fantasia having an element of relatable bildungsroman, or that it politically wore its heart on its sleeve, or that it was highly informative when it came to one portrait of one example of nineteenth century Euro colonizing of non-Euro soil. IN short, I'm glad that my rather uncomprehending experiences with my first Djebar didn't scare me away from giving her a second chance with a more popular work. There won't be a third anytime soon, as I really do need to brush up on the history of Algeria before diving back into Djebar's words, even if this effort only manages to encompass the Algerian War of Independence. The problem with combating the mainstreaming of narratives is having to continually face yet another margin to track down to intellectually stalemate satisfaction, and Djebar is anything but mainstream.

Reading Beauvoir's [b:third volume of autobiography|1202625|Force Of Circumstance|Simone de Beauvoir|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1519720552s/1202625.jpg|6142088] gave me the closest, and likely most accurate, view of the Algerian War for Independence against France that I've ever encountered. Following it up with this was one of those fortunate coincidences put together by 2018 me's efforts to maximize on reading challenges while minimizing on number of books devoted across multiple directives, so in this reading I had that memory of the other side of the Mediterranean to cross examine and reference in juxtaposition to this work on Algerian soil. I liked the beginning the best, as I was both more and less familiar with the framework of the 1848 French Revolution to the point of desperately needing the context of the brutal conquest of Algeria that had occurred a decade or so prior. As I went on, the text unfortunately became increasingly rote in its narration, less unique in individual facts, and more enmeshed in a polyphony of borderline uniform testament, which is admittedly the point Djebar was driving at but still not my preference when it comes to imbibing (non/fic)tion. I also likely lost a great deal in terms of translation, as the sheer exuberance of the English text as embodied by the high flown choices in vocab makes it clear that Djebar was pushing the descriptive abilities of French to the point of forcing the translator into English to struggle to catch up. Not so pressing an observation that I feel compelled to track down a French edition, as Djebar was likely infusing Arabic into the tongue of her colonizers, and learning two languages for the sake of a single work is above my pay grade, especially when considering the dozens of other languages I own literature of. Real knowledge is always a struggle, and I am not ashamed of relying on the work of others to acquire it, for I am already fluent in one too many genocidal languages for my liking, and acquiring even one single other defeats the purpose of my efforts.

I wish this book had struck me more strongly than it ended up doing, but it is doing important work nevertheless, regardless of my own literary personal preferences. As I said, I won't be reading any more Djebar for a long while yet, or at least not until I've educated myself a fair deal more about her mother country. One can easily imagine this author in particular treating Algeria as mother, and that perhaps contributes to my reticence, for personal reasons all my own. In any case, I'm in the midst of a fork in the road that still hasn't been completely resolved, and there are pros and cons on either side of the penultimate decision. Neither of these compares to the choices Djebar's interviewed women had to make, but my uncertainty, and even fear, does allow me to sympathize that much more, as well as commit to working for a world where a people will never savage another in the manner of France with Algeria, or any other pair of conqueror and conquest. Lofty ideals understandably have long timelines, but Djebar just covered four and a half centuries in two and a quarter hundred pages, so the least I can do is focus on the big picture.

'Pélissier made only one mistake: as he had a talent for writing, and was aware of this, he gave in his report an eloquent and realistic — much too realistic — description of the Arabs' suffering...'

While the prose is quite poetic, in the end the book is a bit of a slog to go through. The stories of the women, though very interesting, are very fragmented and while there's somewhat recurring themes in them there's no clear point made with them. It reads like journalistic articles instead of a book. The historic reports of the war in the beginning of the book can be skipped almost entirely. It's quite an unnecessary infodump.

A challenging, complex read, particularly the first half (set in the 1800s), due largely to the history and many names, places, and words that I was not familiar with.