{"id":536,"date":"2009-01-27T00:18:32","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T00:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=536"},"modified":"2009-01-27T00:18:32","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T00:18:32","slug":"fantasia-an-algerian-cavalcade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/27\/fantasia-an-algerian-cavalcade\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m only doing a brief writeup of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, in part because I\u2019m a little pressed for time, but also because there’s so little to say about a book with no plot. The best description I can offer is that it’s an Algerian feminist Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/i>, and while I didn’t quite hate it as I hated the Joyce book, I was never remotely invested in Djebar’s words or characters.<\/p>\n

The core theme is the difficulty of being a woman in an Islamic society, particularly one born into a somewhat liberal home environment within a generally conservative society. A woman could write a pretty good book about this, but Djebar tries to intertwine that thread with one about the French invasion and occupation of Algeria, and another about the narrator’s experiences as a supporter of the Algerian rebels during the war of independence; in fact that main thread about women in Islamic cultures is dropped for a good chunk of the book, so that when it’s reintroduced, you’ve lost the plot, literally.<\/p>\n

I also have to question the quality of the translation. Djebar makes a point of saying that she’s writing in French (her second language) and abhors metaphor and florid language, but the translation is full of bizarre and at times fabricated vocabulary – perhaps she’s the Algerian Chabon, but more likely we have a literal translation rather than one that considers the usage patterns of the two languages.<\/p>\n

Next up: I’m about 40% through Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, and I’m headed out on vacation on Wednesday, with five books in the suitcase, including Graham Greene’s The Quiet American<\/a>\"\"<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m only doing a brief writeup of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, in part because I\u2019m a little pressed for time, but also because there’s so little to say about a book with no plot. The best description I can offer is that it’s an Algerian feminist Portrait of the Artist as a Young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[326,30,327,328],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-africa-12","tag-african-literature","tag-feminist-literature","tag-modernist-literature","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":537,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions\/537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}