I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FOALS-“Inhaler” (2013).

I really really liked Foals debut album.  It was weird and off-kilter and was one of my favorite albums of that year.  I had heard that their follow-up was very different, less weird, more conventional, and I have yet to hear it (narrow-minded, I know).  But then I heard that their new album was really great.  “Inhaler” was the first song I heard.

Man, do I love it. The song opens kind of funky with some noisy echoed guitars.  After a few verses the bridge comes in and the big excitement of the song comes when he gets to the chorus, “I can’t get enough SPACE!”  It’s not so much that he yells “space,” which he does, it’s more the way the whole song explodes with a new exciting riff and it just seems to get bigger and bigger. It blows me away every time.

After the first chorus we drop right back to that falsettoed slow verse delivery.  And the song slowly builds back up again.  The length of the bridge as you anticipate the big chorus is just excruciatingly wonderful.

[READ: April 5, 2013] Cousin K

I found this book when I was cataloging it at my job.  I don’t know what grabbed me about it (there’s nothing special about the cover).  I think it may have been the French Voices label in the corner (and its brevity).  I thought, hey why not read a contemporary French novella for something different.

Well, to my surprise, that is not what I got.  Indeed, nothing in this book is as it seems.

Yasminia Khadra is a pseudonym for Mohammed Moulesshoul.  He chose the name to avoid military censorship (that’s all the book says, I don’t really understand what that means).  Moulesshoul was born in the Algerian Sahara.  He is now retired from the military and is living in France.

But so, instead of this being a story from a French woman, the story is actually from a Male Algerian.  Which doesn’t really matter in the long run, but I assumed that the narrator was a girl (based on the “author = narrator” theory that is an easy shortcut in fiction.  This was really only confusing because the narrator is unnamed for quite a while in the book.

But what a book.  In just 80 some pages, Khadra turns in a  fascinating psychological picture of neglect and psychological abuse.  But it is such an elliptical book that there are almost as many questions as there are answers.  It is this elliptical style which provides some of the confusion, but a lot of the interesting structure of the story.

The story is told in first person with a narrator who seems agitated and perhaps a little unreliable.  We learn that he was a frightened boy.  He discovered his father’s dead body in the barn (and in one of the fascinating elliptical parts, we learn that he was murdered for being a traitor, which was not in fact true–but all the details are left out).  Later his mother became distant and saved all of her love for his older brother, Amine.  So the narrator was scolded at best and at worst utterly ignored.  And when Amine goes off to war, their mother saves all of her attention for letters from him.

Then Cousin K came. Cousin K was a beautiful girl, with the biggest eyes he ha ever seen.  But Cousin K proves to be…awful.  She is mean to him, sucks up to his mother and generally tries to get him in trouble.  Every bad thing that happens in the house she blames on the narrator, and his mother is perfectly willing to accept that explanation.

The beginning of the first part (of two) is a little exhausting because the narrator repeats his angst a lot.  (A lot for such a short book anyway).  But once the action (such as it is) picks up, it’s really intriguing.

As Part 1 ends, his brother returns from the military.  But, horrors!  He has brought a girl with him.  His mother does not approve in any way and she makes it abundantly clear.  Poor Amine has to placate his mother and his girlfriend, who is not impressed.  By the end of Part One, Amine takes off.

Part Two opens some time later.  It takes a while to realize that time has passed and that the narrator is now by himself.  He tells us another update about Cousin K and then the only action of the story begins.

A woman gets thrown out of a car near the narrator’s home.  He sees it happen and offers to let her stay the night at his place—there are no taxis this late and no busses nearby.  She agrees and he is incredibly solicitous, happy to finally have someone who needs him—like Cosuin K never did, like his mother never did.  But this woman is very polite and doesn’t want anything from him, won’t accept any of the nice things he does.

And this seems to cause him to snap.

The end of the story is dark, unexpectedly so (although not really when you consider the circumstances).
I admit that I was a little disappointed with the ending—it seemed like an inevitable conclusion but I rather wish it hadn’t gone in that direction.  Nevertheless, it was an intriguing story with a fascinating narrative structure and an interesting main character.  It was translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and Alyson Waters.