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Summary
Summary
"A tremendous accomplishment. . . . Énard's Zone is, in short, one of the best books of the year"-- Daily Beast
Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangier not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.
Lakhdar's transformations--from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner--take place against some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.
If all of that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend--one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lakhdar opposes. A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Street of Thieves solidifies Énard's place as one of France's most ambitious and keyed-in contemporary novelists. This book may even suprpass Énard's earlier work, Zone , which Christophe Claro boldly declared to be "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."
Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucauld for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone , including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.
Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot, among others. She received a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of Énard's Zone along with a French Voices grant.
Author Notes
Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucauld for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone , including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.
Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot, among others. She received a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of Énard's Zone along with a French Voices grant.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Set against a backdrop of rising Islamic extremism, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement, enard's (Zone) latest novel is a howling elegy for thwarted youth. The narrator, a young Moroccan called Lakhdar, spends his time in Tangier ogling girls with his friend Bassam and reading French detective novels. After he is caught naked with his cousin Meryem, his father disowns him. Enter Sheikh Nureddin, who offers Lakhdar a job as a bookseller for the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, whose under-the-table titles include pamphlets by Sayyid Qutb (an Egyptian writer and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s who was executed in 1966 for plotting the assassination of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser), pointing to the group's nefarious aims. Unlike Bassam, who becomes radicalized by the group, Lakhdar spurns violence and finds escape in books. For Lakhdar, there are two Tangiers-the one referenced by expat authors like Paul Bowles, and the one he himself inhabits; the latter is dismissed by Lakhdar as a simple "homophonic mistake."¿ enard's relentless, incisive prose underscores his thesis that "men are dogs"¿ incapable of determining their fate in the face of the political systems that control them. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A Moroccan teenager with wanderlust learns from the Islamists on his travels through Tunisia and Spain Tangier, Mathias Enard writes in Street of Thieves, is famous "chiefly for the people who leave it". Take, for example, the explorer Ibn Battutah. He left Tangier in 1325 and travelled through much of Africa, the Middle East, eastern Europe and Asia. When he finally returned home, 30 years later, he wrote Rihla, an account of his adventures and one of the most important narratives we have of life in the 14th century. Lakhdar, this novel's 18-year-old narrator, will also leave home and write about it. Though his journeys are limited to Morocco, Tunisia and Spain, they provide a glimpse into the tremors of the Arab spring, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, and the indignados movement in Spain. These subjects may seem ripped from the headlines, but they are not unusual for Enard, a French novelist whose work often focuses on war and political conflict. His first novel, La Perfection du Tir, from 2003, was told from the point of view of a sniper in a civil war, possibly the Lebanese civil war. The prizewinning Zone, first released in 2008, is a single-sentence story about a spy who wants to expose war crimes in several countries bordering the Mediterranean. As Street of Thieves opens, Lakhdar is just another Moroccan boy who spends his days watching the ferries that cross the Strait of Gibraltar. In the summer, he and his friend Bassam smoke kif and ogle women, especially scantily clad tourists. One day Lakhdar is caught in bed with his cousin Meryem, whose "half-transparent housedresses" were driving him mad with lust. Feeling dishonoured, Lakhdar's father beats him up and throws him out of the house. He also beats up Meryem and packs her off to a remote village in the Rif mountains. About Lakhdar's family or what could have compelled such a vicious reaction, we learn nothing, aside from the usual cliches: the father is pious and abusive ("a man of a single book, but a good one, the Qur'an"); the mother is pious and submissive ("my mother moaned in a corner"). Now homeless, Lakhdar travels south, surviving by begging, thieving and prostitution. Some months later, he returns to Tangier, where he finds that Bassam has become friends with Sheikh Nureddin, a friendly and articulate scholar who has started a Muslim Group for the Propagation of Qur'anic Thought. Lakhdar is hired as their bookseller, a job that provides him with a place to live and enough free time to indulge his passion: reading crime novels. But the quiet life doesn't last. Shortly after the Arab spring protests reach Morocco, Bassam and a group of louts beat up a bookseller and burn down his shop on the pretext that he sold soft-porn magazines: Lakhdar is surprised at his own participation. The next day he meets a Spanish student named Judit Foix, and wonders if he would have taken part in the attack had he met her 24 hours earlier. That he should ask himself this question is perhaps a testament to how alienated he is, not just from his family, but from himself. Then Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam vanish, just as a bomb explodes in a popular cafe in Marrakesh. Fearing that the police may come looking for him, Lakhdar decides to disappear as well. He travels to Tunisia to meet Judit, becomes a ferry hand, works for a mortician in Tarifa, and eventually moves to Barcelona. His wanderlust is caused not by a desire to see new places, but to get away from trouble in the old ones. He is an outsider, an interloper, an undocumented immigrant, always subject to forces greater than him. As a political type, Lakhdar is interesting. Like thousands of other north Africans, he is fed up with state repression, yet finds no viable alternative to the government, which makes him susceptible to the ideas of the Islamists. A mix of Candide and Forrest Gump, he grows as a result of his interactions with the people he meets on his travels. As well as learning about politics, Lakhdar also undergoes a literary education: he reads Battuta, Tayeb Salih, Naguib Mahfouz and Mohamed Choukri, finding that "faith was a dead skin that reading books had sloughed off me". But as a character, Lakhdar remains underdeveloped. We never learn much about his life prior to the incident that causes him to be cast out of his home. He has no memories of anything that happened before that day and rarely thinks about the family he left behind. It is as if he were born on the page. Enard is an ambitious writer and his prose, in Charlotte Mandell's translation, has moments of devastating clarity. He draws interesting connections between disaffected youths in Morocco, Tunisia and Spain, and the different ways in which they voice their political discontent. In the end, however, his characters remain too thin to bear the weight of his political observations. * Laila Lalami is the author of the Man Booker-longlisted The Moor's Account (Periscope). To order Street of Thieves for [pound]10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Laila Lalami.
Kirkus Review
A coming-of-age story that plays out across a contemporary landscape of the Arab Spring and other social uprisings. Lakhdar, the narrator, begins his story in Tangier, in his native Morocco. He's obsessed with girls, especially with his cousin Meryem. When he's caught in a compromising position with her, his father beats him, and his family essentially disavows him. Lakhdar begins to work as a bookseller with the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, becoming closer to his friend Bassam and to the group's leader, Sheikh Nureddin. This job provides little nourishment for Lakhdar's restless spirit, however, and neither does a move to a job as a typist with a French businessman. Eventually Lakhdar links up with Judit, a Spanish student studying Arabic in Tangier. We learn that restlessness is not simply personal, but also cultural when violence breaks out in Tangier and Marrakesh. For several months Lakhdar works on the Ibn Battuta, a ferryboat plying the waters between Morocco and Algeciras. Ultimately, he makes his way to Barcelona (where he lives on the eponymous Street of Thieves) to seek out Judit, with whom he'd stayed in desultory contact since she left Tangier, though Lakhdar suspects her passion has cooled. They do get back together, and Judit even helps him get a job tutoring students in Arabic, though their relationship is colored by the discovery that Judit has a tumor. When Sheik Nureddin reappears with Bassam on a business trip to Barcelona, Lakhdar notices how serious and committed his old friend has becomeand his worry eventually leads to tragedy. nard writes passionately about Lakhdar's movement from innocence to experience, and the novel's various settings all ring depressingly true. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
MATHIAS ÉNARD IS a French novelist who has gained recognition in Europe for the scale of his ambitions and the hurtling, anarchic energy of his prose. He has a large appetite for disaster, and his books are packed with wars, massacres, terrorism - with human depravity of every kind. His sentences spin on and on, acquiring a giddy momentum as they lurch through gutters and brothels and kill zones, ending, as often as not, in some netherworld morning-after epiphany. These lurid narratives are also a bouillabaisse of tacit and open reckonings with the writers who have shaped him, both high and low: Céline, Joyce, Burroughs, Homer, Pynchon, the authors of French série noire thrillers. Énard is best known for his 2008 novel "Zone," a wildly erudite book composed of a single 500-odd-page sentence that takes place in the mind of a French-Croatian spy as he travels from Milan to Rome. The plot sprawls across centuries of time and worlds of space as the narrator recalls his own career and lets his mind float through a war-torn landscape haunted by Dante, Ezra Pound and many others. If that sounds unbearable - and at times it is - Énard's encyclopedic ambitions are leavened somewhat by the propulsive rhythm and dreamlike layering effects of his prose, well rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation. By comparison, "Street of Thieves," also translated by Mandell, is mercifully modest in scope. This time Énard's narrator is a young Moroccan who comes of age amid the Arab uprisings of 2011. Those revolts, with their arc of euphoric insurrection and tragic descent into violence, are irresistible bait for a writer like Énard, who is an Arabist by training and teaches Arabic at the University of Barcelona. Yet he wisely avoids pegging his story too closely to the rebellions, which are, after all, still playing themselves out. Like Énard's previous novel, this one is an hommage of sorts to his literary heroes, in particular the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Choukri and the medieval explorer and chronicler Ibn Battuta. This time Énard weaves those models more seamlessly into his story as part of the developing consciousness of his protagonist, a bookish working-class boy named Lakhdar who ends up homeless after his father discovers him in flagrante with a cousin. His early days as a drifter, forced to beg and prostitute himself on the streets of his native Tangier, are clearly inspired by Choukri's celebrated memoir, "For Bread Alone." Later Lakhdar discovers that book, thanks to his Spanish girlfriend. He also reads Ibn Battuta, born in Tangier some 700 years earlier, and includes passages from the explorer's accounts of his travels. Here the echo is more ironic: Lakhdar never gets farther from home than Spain, but he invokes Ibn Battuta's exotic anecdotes as metaphors for his own dislocating, often wildly macabre adventures. These parallels can be powerful; but at times the literary mirror effects strain credulity. When the former street urchin starts citing Casanova, Malcolm Lowry and various Arab poets, one senses the novelist's own voice infecting his character, who observes that he is "locked up in the ivory tower of books, which is the only place on earth where life is good." Énard is at his best when he takes his eyes off Literature and uses his narrative gifts to convey Lakhdar's adolescent yearnings: anguished love for his Spanish girlfriend and nostalgic loyalty to a childhood friend from Tangier who is slowly being radicalized by an Islamist sheikh. This second plotline, seen through Lakhdar's thoroughly lapsed but sympathetic perspective, is artfully told, and represents the kind of fiction one hopes will emerge, from Énard or others, after the tumult once known as the Arab Spring has receded a little further into the past. The narrator ends up homeless after his father catches him in flagrante with a cousin. ROBERT F. WORTH is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he is writing a book about the 2011 Arab uprisings.
