Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde (2015)

In the Francophone world Boualem Sansal has for some time now been well known for his masterly use of language, for his harsh criticisms of Algeria since independence in 1962, and for his courage in speaking out against Islamist extremism. He is a major writer in French, although he is little known in the English-speaking world. I rather think things will change when his 2084 – a kind of update of George Orwell's 1984 – comes out in English translation, assuming (ahem) that it's a good translation.

This is Sansal's seventh novel, and certainly his best. But it's as if all his other novels have been leading up to this: he's covered the past and the present, so here's the future. What he can write after this is beyond me, but then of course that's of no importance here.

2084 : La fin du monde begins with an avertissement, a warning: the reader must ward against thinking that there's any truth here, everything's invented, the characters, the events, everything, and the proof of this is that the story is set in the distant future which in no respects bears any resemblance to our own. It's a work of pure invention, the warning continues, and the world of Bigaye described doesn't exist and there's no reason why it should exist in the future, just as the Big Brother imagined by Orwell in 1984 didn't exist at any time and has no reason to exist in the future. We are told (with an obvious wink) that we should sleep well in the knowledge that all this is fiction and that everything is under control. Yes, of course.

There are some evident similarities between 1984 and 2084: both are dystopias describing totalitarian worlds, both have a shadowy all-powerful leader who subjugates the people, both are in an apparently unending state of war, both have thought police, both are brutal, both have contradictory mottoes, both have a central character who is discovering the nature of and the flaws in the system, both have an underclass which is in certain respects free from the general tyranny, both have a language that seeks to reduce communication to a minimum and indeed destroy independent thought, etc. But there are major differences.

The huge empire described in 2084 is a dictatorship, although not a criticism of  a political system as Orwell's novel intended, but of religious extremism: it is a theocracy, a world ruled by a perceived god. The empire is Abistan, named after the ruler Abi, who is the 'Delegate' of the god Yӧlah – yes, there's a huge temptation to draw analogies, but this is complete fiction remember. What is described is a post-apocalyptic world, that after the wars, in which there is largely emptiness outside the capital, Qodsabad. And despite the title, this is not 2084: 2084 is the date the world began, perhaps when Abi was born, but no one seems certain and anyway the real function of the state is amnesia and submission. (Does that last word suggest Houellebecq? Oh, this is way beyond Houellebecq.)

Abilang (which conjures up Orwell's Newspeak or novlang in French) is the language used here, and the novel is peppered with its neologisms: mockba for mosque, mockbi for imam, Gkabul or livre d'Abi for Qu'ran, the men wear burnis and the women burniqabs, and so on.

Amnesia rules: 'History has been rewritten and sealed by the hand of Abi. [...] For the New Era generations, dates, the calendar, History had no importance, no more than a gust of wind in the sky, the present is eternal, today is always here'. Ati is the Winston Smith character at the beginning just released from a distant sanatorium (suggestions of Mann's Magic Mountain in reverse), and he discovers the truth behind the regime, seeks with his friend Koa and finds that there is certainly life elsewhere, that there are frontiers that can be crossed, that all is not as the lies of Abi would have everyone believe. But what can he do against the religious steamroller?

The System is all-powerful. To Orwell's 'War is peace', 'Freedom is slavery', 'Ignorance is strength' have been added Abistan's own insane vintage: 'Death is life', 'Lies are truth', and 'Logic is absurd'. Abistan's police bomb and murder wholesale, the inhabitants are subject to regular religious health checks and killed if they don't conform to the norm, neighbours must constantly spy on each other, and women are secondary citizens for men to whip.

Devastating.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin
Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand
Boualem Sansal: Harraga
Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis
Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux
Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares

Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin (2011)

Rue Darwin is the final book in the six-novel Romans 1999–2011 collection, and although it's tempting I'll be making a pause of a week or so before reading his latest and only other novel, 2084: you can have too much of a good thing, and it's time for me to take stock of Boualem Sansal.

This novel is the most autobiographical of Sansal's, and is in some respects the most difficult to get to grips with: it doesn't have the familiar long digressive rants about the troubled history of Algeria or the present political situation there, although the content necessitates the usual flashbacks, and the confusion which appears to be endemic in Algeria is mirrored by the narrator's confusion about his own life, indeed about his identity.

The narrator is Yazid, whose mother has just died. He decides that he must return to Rue Darwin, where he was brought up for some time with her and his step-father and his younger step-brothers and step-sisters in a very humble home in Belcourt, Algiers.

Yazid is the only remaining member of the family now living in Algeria: his mother  has just died in Pitié Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where she was flown from Algiers a short time before. Her other sons and daughters – with the exception of Hédi who has been brainwashed by djihadism and whose whereabouts are unknown – were at her bedside although they only saw her in a coma: there's Souad (now Sue), who's a teacher at the University of Berkeley, California; Moundia (now Munya), who's in communication in Canada; Karim (now Karym) who lives in Marseilles; and then there's the rich and powerful Nazim (now Nazym), who's a businessman in Paris.

Yazid wasn't actually raised as a child by his mother but by his grandmother Djéda, or Lalla Sadia, an immensely rich woman who owned a brothel next to her home in an Algerian village. She has contrived to adopt Yazid, who subsequently lives in some splendour and then one of the prostitutes – Farroudja – kidnaps him at the age of eight and he joins his mother and his step-siblings. Although it's nowhere near as simple as that.

Dauod – who like Yazid's brothers and sisters has a westernised name change to David – begins to suddenly develop in importance towards the end of the novel. He was one of the brothel children and was a young friend of Yazid's, so Yazid tries to seek him out when he goes to Paris. It's there that he learns from David's friend Jean that he died of AIDS some year before, although Yazid doesn't tell his (real) mother that Daoud was a homosexual when he returns to Algiers: at the end he learns that his biological mother is in fact Farroudja, whose other son was Daoud, so the 'brothers' and 'sisters' Yazid spent his late childhood and adolescence with have no apparent genetic relation to him. Confusing? Yes, that's the narrator's point: this is Algeria.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:

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Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde
Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand
Boualem Sansal: Harraga
Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis
Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux
Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares

Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand, ou Le journal des frères Schiller (2008)

Le Village de l'Allemand, ou Le journal des frères Schiller is the other novel of Boualem Sansal's which has been translated into English, and the same book appears to bear two different titles: the understable The German Mujahid and the oddly titled An Unfinished Business. It is based on a true story that Sansal once heard.

In 24 April 1994 there is an Islamic attack in the very remote Algerian village of Aïn Deb, in which a forty people die, two of them being the mother and father of the Schiller brothers of the sub-title. The brothers are in fact two narrators who take it in turns to tell the story, although one of them – Rachel – is dead and his notes are being used by Malrich, or rather by the lycée teacher Mme Dominique G. H., who was keen to re-write Malrich's efforts in 'good French'.

The brothers' German father Hans married an Algerian woman and spent the rest of his wife in the small Algerian village of Aïn Deb, never leaving it, and where he was very well respected. But he had the foresight to realise that the Algerian-born boys would need a decent education so sent them to live with their uncle Ali and aunt Sakrina in a high-rise housing estate in Nantes, France. Rachel was a successful engineer until circumstances led to his dismissal, and was thirty-three on his death on 24 April 1996. Malrich, on the other hand, is about nineteen and seems on first appearances to be something of a loser, hanging around with other kids and having no burning interests or ambitions.

Then Rachel is found dead in his garage, and the police chief later hands Rachel's diaries to Malrich, saying that it's in his interests to read them. Malrich devours them, as in them he discovers not only the reason for his brother's suicide but the devastating truth behind his father's seclusion in Aïn Deb. The novel alternates between Rachel's diary and Malrich's thoughts on it, or his account of his activities with his friends.

Rachel's detective work soon reveals the terrifying truth about his father. At first he can't understand why he has been registered and buried with a false name, and his mother under her maiden name. To find out, it takes a hazardous journey back to Algeria, back to his village, to the old house, and papers that reveal that Hans Schiller was a prominent Nazi, who – though the production of the lethal chemical Zyklon B – was indirectly responsible for the deaths of many thousands of innocent people in the death camps of Germany, Austria and Poland.

Rachel becomes obsessed, reads large numbers of books about the systematic destruction of the Jews, visits places his father went, such as his univeristy, the extermination camps, tries to track down his old Nazi friends. Quickly, his obsession and his closeness to insanity lose him his job, his wife, and in the end his life. There are no digressions as such here, only a long and very painful account of the practical and psychological logistics of gassing the equivalent of a villageful of people to death every day in the Nazi slaughter chambers. Rachel choses not only the same day and exact time to die as his father, but the same method: death by gas.

What has this to do with Boualem Sansal's usual attacks on Islamism? Quite a lot, according to Sansal. Malrich is of course a great deal younger than his brother, although old enough to understand, old enough to read and re-read his brother's writings, to read the books he's left, to teach his Muslim friends about the Nazi atrocities they are obviously too young to know about. Plus there's an inevitable analogy to be made between Nazism and Islamist extremism: forty people in Aïn Deb have had their throats slit, and much closer to home the emir, on the instructions of the imam, has strung up young Nadia, bound her naked and used a blow torch on her. Malrich and his moderate friends are ordinary Muslims, a little westernised around the edges naturally, they represent the voice of sanity in a mad, threatening world, and they very strongly condemn this barbarity. A tremendous, harrowing read.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:

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Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde
Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin
Boualem Sansal: Harraga
Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis
Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux
Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares

Boualem Sansal: Harraga (2005)

Harraga, I believe, is one of only two of Boualem Sansal's novels that have been translated into English. Bizarrely, two English-speaking reviewers have described it as spoiled by 'poor storytelling'. The reviewer of one of them – in the Independent – incorrectly states that Sansal published the book in French 2006 and incorrectly suggests that he started writing following his dismissal from his government post: he in fact began writing in the 1990s, partly as a result of being encouraged to do so by his writer friend Rachid Mimouni (1945–95). The same reviewer nevertheless calls the translation 'generally excellent', although I very much doubt that she read it in French too, which would have given her a very good reason to speak of the merits of the translation – if not, then although it may be possible to guess in places if a translation is badly done, it is impossible to tell if a translation is well done without a decent knowledge of both texts: there can be a huge difference between an excellently written translation and an excellently translated book!

Enough ranting, and it's probably needless to say that I read this in the original French. Harraga literally means 'road (or route) burner', and specifically refers here to the number of (young in particular) people escaping from the horrors of Islamist rule. In the introductory page 'Au lecteur' (which inevitably reminded me of Baudelaire again) the narrator states that this is a completely true story with true names and dates, etc, telling of the misery of a world of lost faith and values. The protagonist is the thirty-five-year-old paediatrician Lamia, who lives alone in a house in Algiers: her father died of a poor heart, which was enough to finish off her mother shortly after, her elder brother Yacine is killed in a car crash, and her younger brother Sofiane has decided to escape to Europe for a proper life (OK, for a life – period).

In her teens Lamia was enticed by the charms of an older man who ditched her after use, and speaks of no other man coming into her life, which seems to be dead, and she is filled with depressive – almost insane – suicidal thoughts. Until, that is, the highly inappropriately dressed Chérifa, sixteen and heavily pregnant by (of course) an older man who has dumped her after use, knocks on her door after being sent by Sofiane (who isn't the father). Lamia's life now begins, and in a short time she is treating Chérifa as a mother would, very swiftly developing a love of her.

Unfortunately Lamia's motherliness is a little too stern, and Chérifa thinks she isn't wanted, so leaves, and Lamia falls into an even deeper depression. And then Chérifa, even more pregnant, returns and lights up Lamia's life again, although the girl disappears once more and can't be can't be found. Until her life changes when she receives a phone call from a nun in the Notre-Dame-des-Pauvres convent. There Lamia weeps over Chérifa's simple grave, but leaves with baby Louiza (yes, another Sansal adoption), named after a long gone school friend of hers. Her life as a mother – in fact her 'real' life – begins.

But not before some very strong insults spoken to the understanding sisters about the nature of the barbarians in Algeria, whom she calls 'wicked, hateful, satanic and dirty'. When the mother superior advises Lamia to moderate her language for her own good, the outspoken but tactful Lamia replies that she knows when to be a hypocrite when it's necessary.

Dazzlingly written, Harraga is told throughout in the first person and although the novel doesn't contain the verbal fireworks of his other works, there are two very long hallmark digressions: one to describe the motley history of Lamia's house, and another when Lamia watches a television programme on harragas, who are noted for losing their lives when trying to cross the Mediterranean, and where many of them could easily be Sofiane.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:

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Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde
Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin
Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand
Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis
Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux
Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares

Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis (2003)

In my post below on Boualem Sansal's Le Serment des barbares I mentioned his fondness for quoting from books. More than halfway through his third novel, Dis-moi le paradis, a character changes the chorus of Baudelaire's 'L'Invitation au voyage' –  'Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, | Luxe, calme et volupté' (roughly 'Over there, there is nothing but order and beauty, luxury, peace and voluptuousness') to 'Ici, tout n'est qu'est que désordre et mocheté | Lucre, drame et vanité' (roughly 'Here, there is nothing but disorder and ugliness, greed, catastrophe and vanity.') My main point is not the intertextuality which characterises Sansal's books, not even that inevitably the desperate situation in Algeria is being satirised, but the fact that the two lines of verse are so funny. And Sansal's humor is particularly highlighted in his third novel. But what better place to set the framework of such a work than a bar, where so many people relax telling funny stories? (Yes, of course it's deadly serious too, but that's not the point: Sansal can find a funny way to describe anything.)

The bar in question here the Bar des Amis in Bab El Oued in Algiers, which is run by Ammi Salah. Here Tarik, who's a medical doctor in the capital and known to all of the customers simply as Doc, tells the best stories and the book is full of his words. He tells of how he drove his two cousins Farida and Romyla (on two separate journeys) from Algiers to M'Sila, where the sisters' mother has died.

There are of course many digressions of many pages to describe various characters and situations, but the narrative essentially operates between a number of flashbacks related by Doc, punctuated by returns to the bar. M'sila is hit by a cholera epidemic, inevitably bringing to mind both García Márquez's El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) and Camus's La Peste (The Plague), and it's well known that Camus's plague of rats stands for the Nazi activities during World War II. At great risk to their lives, several of the characters later set off from the ravaged M'Sila to the remote M'Cif, where they also tend to those in a tribe stricken by cholera. And then they are about to have their throats slit by a rival tribe but are saved in the nick of time. Does this sound like a shaggy dog story?

Well, speaking of dogs, when they were on their way back from Algiers airport they had to stop to eat something in Palestro as Doc said they were so hungry they could have eaten off the head of a scabby dog, and then says – the olive oil bottle being empty – that the waiter instead used a liquid that seemed to have come from a sump oil container. What do we make of this mad talk?

One thing to make of it, of course, is that there's (as Doc admits at the end) a lot of exaggeration in this, although surely he has to exaggerate to prove a point? At one point Doc punningly mentions 'Tonton chez les Gaulois' and certainly at times this novel has the flavor of a cartoon. 'Le gnome', similar to a deformed gnostic genius from the Talmud and cabbalistic literature and 'adopted' by the family in M'Sila, has cartoonish traits too. A modern Rabelais in north Africa?

And what of the little boy whom Doc 'adopts' after seeing him forlorn in a corner of the crummy restaurant, who causes Doc's wife to leave home, whom Doc discovers bears the forename of Boudmediene after the detested Algerian dictator, who seems somewhat nihilistic until he perks up and asks Doc to tell him about paradise, thus giving the book its title? A literary relation to the mad boy in the hollow tree?

For Sansal and for many more in Algeria, paradise is quite the reverse of modern Algeria, and at the end of the novel Doc relates the depressing history of the country, including the history of M'Cif and M'sida. He entrusts his words with, er, the writer. Another amazing book from Boualem Sansal.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:
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Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde

Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin
Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand

Boualem Sansal: Harraga
Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux
Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares

Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux (2000)

L’enfant fou de l’arbre creux (lit. The Mad Boy in the Hollow Tree) is set in the present day in the Algerian prison of Lambèse, where two prisoners – the French 'visitor' Pierre Chaumet and the Algerian Farid – are threatened with the death sentence. Outside in the yard – although only perceived by Pierre – is a mad boy chained to a hollow tree where he sleeps. Sansal has said that the prison represents Algeria itself, where the inhabitants are imprisoned by the system. And the blind boy – only perceived by Pierre because only outsiders have the ability to take full consciousness of a reality that doesn't belong to them – represents the Algerian people. Pierre and Farid have a long time to talk about their lives, and this is the main content of the book.

Some readers were – perhaps a little understandably – somewhat discouraged by Sansal's Le Serment des barbares because of its digressive nature and its tendency to rant. L’enfant fou de l’arbre creux is, as can expected, still a very strong criticism of post-independent Algeria, but is more firmly rooted to 'conventional' narrative, far less given to long digressive passages. But the obvious love of language and the supremely rich vocabulary and poetic means of expression remain.

Farid's story is soon told: he got caught up Islamist killers.

Pierre's story is much longer. He was brought up in France not by his biological parents but the medical doctor Hector Chaumet and his wife Marie-Madeleine: his father died before he was born and his mother Aïcha (who is now in a psychiatric hospital) left him in the care of the Chaumets three months after his birth. Pierre was born Khaled El Madauri, and at the age of thirty-seven has clandestinely returned to find out about Khaled, to discover his origins, learn the truth about his father's death.

In his search, Pierre takes along '22 long rifle' Salim to Vialar (now called Tissemsilt), which is three hundred kilometres from the capital. The hospital director is a drunkard who trades in selling patients off for as much as he can get: according to the taxi driver who carries Pierre and Aïcha away, psychiatric patients sell for a premium because their 'owners' can make money by turning them into beggars. Possibly Sansal is exaggerating here, but at least the general point he's trying to make is clear. And as Pierre discovers the truth about his father's death, he discovers too much, hence the mess he's now in.

Sansal continues his task of revealing the atrocities, the violence, corruption, ignorance, the internecine conflicts within modern Algeria. And the way he tells his story is spell-binding.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde
Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin
Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand
Boualem Sansal: Harraga
Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis
Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares

Boualem Sansal: Le Serment des barbares (1999)

I suspect that a major reason why Gallimard brought out this collection of all of the six novels that Boualem Sansal published before this year's 2084 is because they imagined that he'd win the Goncourt, and certainly it was a big shock for many people this Tuesday to learn that 2084 didn't even make it to the Goncourt's third selection. We may never know why, although it has been suggested that Sansal is perceived as an Islamophobe, which doesn't square with reality: he simply doesn't like Islamic excesses.

The six novels contained in this volume of more than 1200 pages tight pages are Le Serment des barbares (1999), L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux (2000), Dis-moi le paradis (2003), Harraga (trans. as the same title) (2005), Le Village de l'Allemand, ou Le journal des frères Schiller (trans. as An Unfinished Business) (2008), and Rue Darwin (2011). Also here is an informative Preface by Jean-Marie Laclavetine, plus an even more informative potted and illustrated history of Boualem Sansal's life, with the history of Algeria from 1940 up to the present day.

Sansal married a Czechoslovakian but a new law required that children of 'mixed' marriages be taught the Islamic religion. Sansal sent his two daughters back to Czechoslovakia to their maternal grandparents. The marriage ended in divorce in 1986, Sansal saying that his personal life had been ravaged by Islamists.

Sansal was also responsible for what he euphemistically calls the 'restructuring' (for which read privatisation) of the Algerian economy,* although in the same year his third novel was published he was dismissed from this post: he had gone too far in his criticisms of the chaos-ridden country Algeria had become in the years following its independence from France in 1962.

*Unfortunately Sansal is far from being a friend of socialism and sees it as outmoded, whereas many of us in western Europe have seen exactly how chaotic and socially unjust, for instance, the privatisation of public utilities actually is. In an interview, Sansal interrupted his interviewer because he used the expression 'selling off' ('brader') in relation to privatisation and claimed that the word was a hangover from the days of socialism. Enter 'restructuring', then, which to me seems almost to smack of the Orwellian 'Newspeak' Sansal so detests.

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But on to the first novel, Le Serment des barbares, which is a runaway train, or a whirligig, a linguistic roller coaster in which Sansal seems to be going out of his way to show his considerable learning on his sleeve. 'Rabelaisian' is one of the words that are often used to describe his work, and this novel (perhaps in particular, as I haven't yet read the rest) is a wonderful display of verbal pyrotechnics, using often very long digressive sentences often soaked in polysyllabic words, or Algerian words or terms both common and less common, or slang words, words for the love of words, often clothed in literary allusions.

All this to describe the chaos that Sansal now sees as Algeria, the political divisions within the country, the arabisation, more frequently the mindless violence, the wholesale slaughter, the misrule, the horror of daily existence. Perhaps most of all, the manufacture of ignorance: Sansal sees a triple illiteracy: the loss of French, the mis-teaching of Arabic, and the death of Kabyl and other native languages.

There's a detective story at the root of Le Serment des barbares, and the book begins in a cemetery, where two very different people are being buried: the very rich Moh who's a kind of godfather, and the poor Abdallah Bakour, both of whom have been violently murdered: the ageing police officer Larbi's job is to pursue the investigation into the Abdallah killing.

As Larbi makes his enquiries throughout the book – between the various tangents that Sansal digresses into – we inevitably learn about Abdallah's past. Until the year after Algerian independence he had been an agricultural worker for a French family in Algeria, and when they moved back to France he continued to work for the family: bosses had died and others taken their place, but he was still greatly respected by the family in his new home and had more or less been thought of as one of the family. He had refused to accept money to upkeep the family tomb when he returned to Algeria at the age of sixty-five, but maintained it freely, living in a very modest home near the Christian cemetery. He is in fact a kind of symbol, his double identity standing for the possibility of tolerance, bringing the torn parts of the country together.

Alas, Larbi – mockingly referred to as both Maigret and Columbo – is too good at his job. He knows there's something wrong, knows it defies common sense that this harmless, humble soul should be assassinated as if he's a gang boss, so what's it all about? He gnaws away at it, a dog digging up a bone, digging, now... it couldn't be that drugs and weapons are buried in the tombs and Abdallah...? Too late, cop.

This is a rant, but it's a hugely powerful one, a tour de force, a kind of masterpiece. Boualem Sansal enters the world of Francophone fiction like a verbal steam roller.

My other posts on Boualem Sansal:

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Boualem Sansal: 2084 : La fin du monde
Boualem Sansal: Rue Darwin
Boualem Sansal: Le Village de l'Allemand
Boualem Sansal: Harraga
Boualem Sansal: Dis-moi le paradis

Boualem Sansal: L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux