There are bridges which we cannot burn down after crossing them, because they stay inside us, like a memory. There are countries in which we live and countries which live in us, so says Khaled. The one he lives in is France, against whom he fought in order the break her chains from Algiers, which is the one living in him. His language is French, the manacle he cannot free himself from after all those years while Arabic is almost forgotten. Even his mistress is French, but France gave him everything that Algiers didn't.
He left it more than two decades ago, disappointed in the corruption and what was left of the homeland for which he lost his hand in the revolution. Now, he's a renowned painter. An exile in a foreign land, whose canvases reflect the longing for the fatherland even though he doesn’t speak out loud about it, and then, one night at his exhibition, she appears. The last time he saw her, she was a baby on his lap, the daughter of a friend and commander, now a sensual woman who stirred his passion.
It's a stream-of-consciousness novel told completely in the second person in which Khaled talks to her, after all, it is because of her that he writes this novel. To kill her and be liberated from here as she once told him: „We write novels to kill those whose existence has become a burden. Those who we love“. 'The Bridges of Constantine' is much more than just a love story, it goes beyond that. That story about the unconsumed love, and passion between the painter and writer, a desire he feels for her, it's only a metaphor for yearning after his homeland because Hayat is not only a young woman in his life. She's the Constantine, the city of his birth, Algiers, Arabian world, postwar generation. A mother. Bridges of Constantine which connects the cliffs and gorges upon which the city was built. She's the sum of his longing, desires, disappointments, sorrows, lies, and hatred.
Just as Ahmed Nurudin thinks of his brother, and along the way tumbles through his mind certain questions and doubts, so is Khaled thinking about the homeland and all of that which is a burden to him, and because of that, this novel evokes memories of [b:Death and the Dervish|358846|Death and the Dervish|Meša Selimović|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347814584l/358846._SY75_.jpg|348971], a novel by Meša Selimović, mainly because of the Oriental approach to certain topics. Through Khaled's thinking, Ahlem discusses women's rights and politics, intertwined with subtle erotic in a way only a poet can do, but also talks about the hypocrisy of culture, the paradox in which they live, and double standards. That's clear from the chapter in which Khaled returns to Constantine for the first time to be at her wedding he walks through the streets of his hometown and stops in front of the brothel which was visited by all men, which the women hid, and then he hears the call to prayer from a nearby mosque. As Khaled brings his story to the end, due to his brother's tragic death and the miserable life he led, he realizes that he must go back and that the bridges of Constantine, an eternal motif of his painting, calling for him and they will continue to do that, as long as he lives in a foreign land.
It's been a while since I read a novel as powerful as this, in which the man in his fifties has represented himself so convincingly but is written by a woman, at that time, in her thirties. Maybe because there's a lot of Ahlem's father in the character of Khaled, but she also. He was the part of that generation that fought for freedom only to get disappointment while she's the part of the postwar generation.
At the time of publishing, Ahlem had difficulties proving that it was, indeed, her novel due to how convincingly it was written. Because of her poems, published in the collections before 'The Bridges of Constantine', and the themes she dealt with, she lost the ability to continue her studies in Algiers so she went to Paris to graduate.
With her poetic style, she wrote an elegy of a generation that fought for the ideal and vanished under corruption and hypocrisy. A novel that must be read.

Khalid, a former Algerian revolutionary, falls in love with the daughter of an old friend and comrade. Those are the bare bones of the plot, but it not so much a love story about people as a love story about people and their ideals.

I don't think I can do this book justice. The story has a deceptively leisurely pace and structure; while the language is occasionally melodramatic, the work as a whole is thematically tight and unsparing in its attempt to measure Algeria's past against its present. The act of falling in love is, for Khalid, both an exorcism and a reclamation of the vision that led to his involvement in the Algerian Revolution, but whether he succeeds on either account is up to the reader to decide.

This is a smart handling of potentially heavy-handed material. A haunting, elegiac book.

غريبة تلك العلاقة التي تربط الوطن بالحب.......

Ahlam Mosteghanemi skillfuly blends memories of her novel characters with Algerian revolution.

لست أميل لـ" أنتِ هنا في قلبي دائماً " وتوابعها ، لكن استهوتني جمالية الوصف بعمق !!

أجمل وافخم شي لمن تجمع بين قصة حب وتاريخ وطن ودا الجمال موجود في ذاكرة الجسد . .

يشتمل على عناصر الرواية الناجحة في رأيي؛ التاريخ العربي المحمل بالآلام، الحاضر المضجر، و المستقبل المجهول. تلتحم فيه المأساة بالفرح، معطيةً لنا ثمراتٍ لم نكن لنستطيع قطافها بمفردنا.

Corny

رائعة بكل المقاييس