Discovery of the New World

Book excerpt: Fiction. Poetry. Translated by Peter Thompson. Introduction by Pierre Joris. DISCOVERY OF A NEW WORLD collects, for the first time in English, Algerian francophone writer Nabile Farès' ambitious trilogy of novellas reflecting on the effects of French colonialism in North Africa. The trilogy includes The Olive Grove (Le Champ des oliviers, Editions du Seuil, 1972); Memory of the Missing (Mémoire de l'Absent, 1974); and Exile and Helplessness (L'Exil et le désarroi, 1976). These heavily experimental works, set in the time just before and after the Algerian war with France, probe issues of identity--race, gender, nationality--in the wake of European colonialism. Just as Algeria itself has found only the most difficult paths after independence (paths glimpsed, in all their neocolonial cynicism, in Exile and Helplessness), and just as Farès himself renounced a future in Algeria and many of his books could not, until just now, be published there, the protagonist of this work is left with loss of purpose, shadows of loved ones, and a village that will never be the same. "The first thing that hits me every time I open or reopen one of Nabile Farès' books," writes Pierre Joris in the Preface, "is the immediacy of the intense struggle--simultaneously, the glorious success--of a text that stays at white heat by bending/bedding itself between what some would call the 'genres' of poetry & prose." And surely one of Farès most distinctive talents is his ability to convey the sense of political struggle by means of structural tensions within the language itself. And it takes a master translator like Peter Thompson to bring these delicate issues of style and form into English.