Last November, Algerian author Yasmina Khadra stunned North Africa and beyond by announcing his candidacy for Algeria’s 2014 presidential race. “I am an author, but above all I am an Algerian who is concerned about his country’s future,” he told reporters soon after his declaration. “I patiently waited for an honest and credible candidate to step forward. But no one ever did, so I have decided to join the race myself.”
This is not the acclaimed author’s first bombshell announcement. Yasmina Khadra is in fact a female pseudonym that the author, born Mohammed Moulessehoul, donned in order to avoid military censorship while serving as an officer in the Algerian army. In the ’90s, while he was still enlisted, Khadra’s novels about the Algerian civil war were popular in France, where readers thought they had found a female Muslim whose voice could shed light on the violence engulfing their nation’s old colony. Then, after he retired from the military in 2000, Khadra revealed his true identity. Instantly, his novels—especially their disparaging depictions of Algeria’s Islamic fundamentalist rebels—were reexamined, often with fresh accusations of prejudice and chauvinism.
It’s in these moments, when Khadra challenges our notions of authorship, our conceptions of what an author can and cannot do, that he is at his most fascinating. This is why Cousin K is such a gripping read. Throughout the novella—published in French in 2003 and translated into English in 2013 by Donald Nicholson-Smith and Alyson Waters—the unnamed narrator remains mysterious, absurd, and flouts our expectations.
Tormented by agoraphobia, the narrator still lives with his mother, and they both inhabit an otherwise empty manor that overshadows Douar Yatim, a desolate Algerian village. The story itself is built upon the narrator’s fragmented musings, recollections, and actions as he wanders through these strange locales. The most important narrative strand involves his childhood relationship with the beautiful Cousin K, whom he loves desperately:
The sun, the moon, the thunder, the universe, the entire universe is meaningless and mute when Cousin K is silent. Cousin K is my reason for living. Her laughter is a symphony, the radiance of her eyes pure enchantment.
Yet Cousin K scoffs at the narrator’s affection, instead mocking his aloofness, which, even as a child, defines his relationship (or lack thereof) with others.
So initially the narrator appears to be a victim—of his cousin’s unrequited love, of his own loneliness, and of his mother’s neglect. Describing his mother, he recalls:
Never did her lips brush my cheek; never did her fingers smooth my hair. […] We were together but did not know each other. I have no idea what that did to her; for my part, it was as if I had inadvertently landed in an empty circus ring: I was ashamed as many times over as there were vacant seats in the stands.
But eventually it becomes clear that, much like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, the narrator has been masking an evil soul with eloquent prose. Early on, he lets slip a few fleeting hints of his sociopathy, like when he states, “I liked seeing my mother suffer. It was one of the rare moments when I felt she was made of flesh and blood.” By the novella’s conclusion, the narrator’s disparate recollections cohere into a startling portrait of his savagery. Khadra then delivers a pulse-pounding denouement to oppose the fragmented pacing that defined the first half of the book.
For those who have read Khadra’s other, better-selling texts, this ambiguity and character depth will come as a relief. In the 2000s, Khadra went on to write a widely read and translated trilogy of novels that examine modern Islamic fundamentalism—The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad. With settings that span from Iraq to Israel, these novels attempt to answer a question that has preoccupied every Westerner in the modern age: Why would someone choose to become a terrorist? Indeed, this is a worthy topic for an author to explore. But in his trilogy, Khadra’s writing is so pedagogic that the novels feel less like fiction and more like the same essay, told in slightly different ways. Repeatedly.
The Attack especially suffers from Khadra’s heavy-handedness. The novel begins and ends with several pages describing, in nauseating detail, an explosion that rips through a crowded Palestinian street. And while Cousin K certainly has its share of violence, Khadra earns it this time, as when the narrator recalls in terse terms how his father was murdered during the Algerian revolution:
My father died on the eve of the Great Day. I was five years old. I was the one who found him hanging from an S-hook in the stable, naked from head to toe, his eyes gouged out, his sex in his mouth. […] I don’t recall how long I stood rooted to the spot. Someone came to me, put his hands over my eyes and led me away from the nightmare.
This is the narrator’s only depiction of his father—or, for that matter, politically motivated violence. Yet the image endures in the reader’s mind throughout the novella, and it suffuses the narrator’s actions as he becomes increasingly sadistic and unpredictable.
At times, Khadra’s prose, which constantly strives for lyricism and profundity, comes off as frustratingly trite. In her New York Times review of The Attack, Lorraine Adams bemoans that novel’s abundance of clichéd phrases—the protagonist finds himself caught “like a rat in a trap”, for instance—which she attributes to John Cullen’s translation. But such platitudes appear across Khadra’s other works, too, even with different translators. Sadly, Cousin K is no exception—the first chapter begins, “Time passes and waits for no one.” Yet because here Khadra writes with ambivalence instead of the moralistic fury that characterizes his more popular work, his language remains fresh enough to overcome his penchant for sweeping maxims.
Yasmina Khadra is not, as The Philadelphia Inquirer has suggested, “the most powerful and serious writer in French since his Algerian compatriot Albert Camus.” His prose is simply too hit-and-miss, and his thematic aims too often inhibit his storytelling. But in Cousin K, as the narrator rambles senselessly across his surreal desert village, attending the funerals of strangers and obsessing over his relationship with his mother, the influence of Camus is undeniable. It was Camus who inspired Khadra to write in the first place, and Cousin K is buoyed by an excitement for the written word and for a good story. It’s Khadra the writer we get here, not Khadra the statesman. With Cousin K, we see a fearless author before he became an internationally renowned authority on Islamicism, before he became a politician, and, perhaps, before he became a president.
