| Title | : | Infidèles |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9782021084689 |
| Language | : | French |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 187 |
| Publication | : | First published August 1, 2012 |
| Awards | : | Albertine Prize Longlist (2017) |
Infidèles Reviews
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ANOTHER review I can't think how I missed posting here for five years! Jeesh.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Stellar, stellar read. I was sent to the online translation-dictionary at least 10 times, which is a good thing for me. It's a genuine pleasure to look at and hold, as you'd expect from a Seven Stories book. The story only makes the aesthetic pleasure better, as well-crafted as such a concentrated fiction can possibly be.
As with all of Taïa's writing, this is a spectacularly beautiful-sounding text.War was declared from the very first note. This woman...was not afraid of repeating herself, of saying the same words over and over, fighting a solitary battle. The battle of love, of course.
You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
And if a word was said in anger
And injured our hearts
We forget our sadness
And which of us spoke,
It's through the soul that we love
We'll always be together
All our lives, together
Whatever happens
I loved you
When I found you
Before my eyes a distant dream
Was in my eyes
Out of reach
The next moment it was in my hand
Who chooses to leave paradise?
Why destroy our own hopes
And spend the rest of our lives regretting
What happened?
You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
Never
Never
Give you up
Whatever happens.
It took our breath away.
The song lasted almost seven minutes. It was so powerful. And the voice...rang out from the heart of the war. War to the bitter end, the final breath. ...
"The man she's talking about in that song doesn't exist. No man can be worthy of such love and sacrifice."
You will never know how much the moment costs while you're in it, but that is the precise inflection point where a youth becomes a warrior.
It is Part III that seems to cause Muslims the most outrage, the betrayed hurt of being misunderstood from within; Taïa is one of their own! He sends young Jallal into such pain and loneliness that not even a god could endure; a mother murdered before her body dies and all for what? What justifies the torture of another soul? (Nothing, of course, but there's always a reason even when there can be no excuse.) And here is Mouad, a stranger, a Belgian whose heart heard the Prophet's call; he has parts of Jallal's mother that her son can't see or hear, so naturally he hates the man who usurped his child's place beside his mother.
But it is Mouad who, indirectly, leads Jallal to Mathis-Mahmoud; leads him to a death that is Resurrection and completion.
Yes, the horror happens.
But God is beyond mere human hates and judgments. Mathis-Mahmoud and Jallal are, in a soliloquy of God's, united and blessed and made whole together.You see, I'm like you. In misfortune and in power. Divine and orphaned. I'm made of the same stuff as you. I'm in you. In every body. Every night. Every dream.
Don't cry, Jallal.
Take his hand, Mathis.
Go. Go. As brothers of the heart. There, behind that door, life has not even begun for you.
Go. On the way you'll pass a beautiful pomegranate tree. Pick two pomegranates. And later, before you go to sleep, take a moment to eat them. -
No one could force this fate to change. Divert, cancel, fight it or get around it.
*
“People don’t understand the earth. We don’t know how to be real anymore. You must never completely open up to others, my son, not even to people who love you. Resist. Resist. Never tell everything about yourself, your story, your heart. Never give yourself completely. Nobody deserves that honor. Do you understand?”
*
I understood the identification. It isn’t just blood that unites beings to one another. Souls meet, recognize each other and speak, even when gulfs, oceans lie between them.
*
And what could I do with my disappointed, bruised heart? -
"Deep inside me, words will always be Arabic. That’s the language inside me, there long before me. It sticks to my skin, goes far beyond me, speaks to me in spite of myself."
I was doing fine until that sudden twist of narrative towards the end where Islam was portrayed as a hallmark for terrorism.
It was cheap, illogical and downright the wrong wrong WRONG choice to take to drive the plot forward. This book could have been taken to a completely different path that is so much less problematic.
In short:
Annoying, hasty, incoherent, sloppy and jumbled writing. Basically, words vomit.
Pedophilia. Romanticized Pedophilia used as stepping stone for lgbt representation( ha! Not today MAPS)
Wrong reflecting image of Islam.
I am so disappointed with everything in this book. -
Taia’s words have burrowed into my mind, one visceral, persistent lyric at a time. I know nothing to do with such a piece literary passion than to go sit on my porch with some tea and contemplate. Depending on how long this processing takes, tea may turn into wine. I believe it will take long enough for wine...
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My final book of the year and this was a great one to end the year with. I am a huge fan of this author. Divided into parts and written from the perspectives of different family members. I love the authors writing style, having read other books by him. It’s powerful and raw, the poetry of language here is amazing. The one thing I didn’t enjoy was when a white character converted to Islam to carry out a suicide bombing, a suicide bombing can be carried out by anyone, one doesn’t need to convert to Islam to become one. That lost me a little.
"Deep inside me, words will always be Arabic. That’s the language inside me, there long before me. It sticks to my skin, goes far beyond me, speaks to me in spite of myself." -
Uma escrita poética sobre uma história de dor na busca da pertença e da identidade.
Uma mulher marroquina, prostituta e o seu filho. Do exílio é da fuga para o Cairo, a deslocação e a redescoberta no centro da Europa. O fim partilhado entre Medina e a morte mártir num acto terrorista.
Num tempo que simplifica o que na realidade é cheio de complexidade Abdelá Taia escreve um belíssimo texto que me prendeu e me fez reflectir.
Mais uma vez fica o apelo para a a necessidade da tradução e edição deste autor marroquino. -
Nobody will come. You know it. It’s too late. Or too early
We’ve been waiting a very long time. It’s over. It’s over
God already accepts us as we are. He made us this way
In this condition. In this situation. We accept His decisions
Look at the sky for a long time. It’ll break open in the end. Explode
I’ll wait until the Angel comes to cleanse me, give me new life. A new name
Our past won’t exist here. We’ll write it the way we want to. Another story
This is reality. Moroccan reality. Hard. Bitter. Ruthless
Now my words are worth their weight in gold
Listen to me
My legacy, my light, my final memory. Listen. Listen
Time passed quickly, very quickly, too quickly
Let me look at you a moment
People don’t know anything about anything
I went to the mausoleum
I lay down by the tomb of the saint
A sense of peace came over me. I felt lighter. I travelled
I told him everything. That’s what he’s there for, our saint
I didn’t choose that fate. I found myself inside it
My knowledge. My songs. My rituals
Everything was going to be lost. Disappear forever
He saw the life in me still throbbing, untamed
I’m dying and I can still hear them
I’m leaving and his voice comes back to me, beautiful, pure, welcoming
Night isn't made for dreams
Night is for finding the truth at last. Deciding everything
Go to the places I've been. Continue my story
I gave myself to him, opened myself, body, heart and soul
Everything in me is his. Living. Dead
I sang a Berber song. A nocturnal lullaby
The future arrives quickly
You’ll be there, in that blank time
Love is a traveller on the River of No Return, swept on forever to be lost in the stormy sea
A song. A language we made our own
Through the long night we were going to rewrite everything
I watched television. That was where I learned to see things more clearly
The connections between people. Evil. Good. Masks. Languages. Illusions
We had to beware of other people, all people
You must never completely open up to others
Resist. Resist. Never tell everything about yourself, your story, your heart
Never give yourself completely. Nobody deserves that honour
A love that went beyond
Beyond her circumstances and reality
Constant refusal to exist in words that were said and said again
life is not only life, there’s something else
There is beauty. There are rules
Beyond appearances. Eternally wandering. Sad
Souls gaze at each other. They are one
The tree is not dead. I finally understood
I’ll die with her. We’ll fall together. We’ll rise again
Building a persona over many years is what I respect in artists
Strong commitment, all the way
Real conviction that goes beyond singing
Intelligence put toward a real cause
He likes what I like
He’s my memory and my forgetting
He’ll like what I tell him to like
He’ll be what I tell him to be
He comes from me. I'm his origins, his country, his future
War was declared from the very first note
She was not afraid of repeating herself, of saying the same words over and over, fighting a solitary battle
The battle of love, of course
You whose love gave my life flavour, colour I’ll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens. Never. Never
Cairo possessed me. The crowds, twenty million, kept me company. Protected me
I learned solitude in Cairo
Solitude in the midst of an angry but remote, unfeeling humanity
Adolescence is a time of power
Every day is a tragedy. Every day is war
Peace does not exist. Will never exist in us
We were wrong. We’ll always, always be afraid
Draw closer to a heart. Listen to it. Follow its rhythm. Enter its mystery
Beyond the seventy thousand veils. Explode. Explode with love
Every day and every night a little more. I’ll scream. I’ll love
Lost souls. The jungle. Madness. Injustice everywhere, day and night
Everything disappearing, collapsing
Casablanca was a vale of grief
More than any other place in Morocco, the city was permeated by deep and incurable sorrow
That great big city of eight million people was empty. Completely. Totally -
De entrada ya me llamó la atención la sinopsis y el hecho de haber leído con anterioridad a Taïa hizo que escogiera Infieles. Se lee casi del tirón. Mientras estás leyendo, te da la sensación de estar acompañando a Selima y Yalal. Sus historias están cargadas de dolor, tristeza, violencia y crueldad pero cada uno con sus principios, deseos y fuerza interior. Me ha gustado y recomiendo la lectura de Infieles.
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4.5
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In 2018, I bought this book to accompany me on a solo trip to Morocco. Being gay, I was excited to read a gay author who grew up in the culture I'd be experiencing for the first time. But, trying to read a book written from the point of view of an abused and abandoned child, while vacationing alone as a stranger in a strange land proved to be too much, so I put I put it down to focus all of my attention on the seaside of Essaouira, petting the cats, running from dogs, and trying to make the best decisions possible about which strangers to talk to and go home with. (Not like that, but it was a good trip.)
You should read this book if you care about sex workers and gay children, if you've ever been orphaned or adopted, if you love Marilyn Monroe, if you believe in religious ecstasy, or if you have ever hated a place so much it became a person upon whom you wanted to exact revenge. You might also like this book if movies have ever saved your life, if you've converted to Islam, learned Arabic, known Morocco well, or have an interest in the politics of the Morocco, including the occupation of the Western Sahara and the Sahrawi people.
You should not read this book if you will recoil from extensive depictions of spitting, political torture or sexual assault or if you don't enjoy the shifting and unpredictable experience of multiple narrators. Seriously, the word "spit' is used 12 times in the first two pages and the narrator is just getting warmed up! Take good care of yourself before and after you embark on Part 2 of Chapter 2. You'll hear from about 5 or 6 characters before all is said and done.
Highlights for me include the very poetic and tender description of a tree dying upon being felled and the comi-tragic depiction of Marilyn Monroe as an angel at the gates of heaven, which made this perhaps the gayest book I've ever read. I was also taken by the brief love affair at the end of the book between the narrator, now a young Moroccan living in Belgium and a young Belgian man, a convert to Islam who is dying of HIV or cancer or both. Taia captures the ecstasy and treachery of fast, young love between sexual outsiders, when our lives are already super-charged, or laid bare, depending on how you look at it, by trauma, sickness, and the sadism of the State.
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The story of Jallal, a Moroccan suicide bomber, written in lyrical prose using the voices of several narrators besides Jallal, including his mother and grandmother, both prostitutes, his Belgian stepfather, and Marilyn Monroe.
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Powerfully written and raw. It transports you to the scene and reality of life. The poetry of the language here is amazing. There is a sadness mixed with longing, and a lesson on what moved people forward. I can't recommend this book enough to people.
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Imagining the most human intimacy. To know ones beauty reflected back to them and realizing their own worth. A gracious story with openness, mystery, darkness and brilliance.
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kinda torn about how i feel about this.
taïa possesses a very particular writing style that reminds me of my own at times but in the opposite way. all of his sentences are short and often straightforward, sometimes only phrases left grammatically incomplete. the frequency of periods and lack of commas really forced me to slow down, which irritated me at times because it was like every other sentence, but i came to appreciate it generally. his structure for storytelling confused me at first as well. first it's jallal when he's 10 and angry at the world (rightfully so), then saadia, then slima, and finally back to jallal in his 20s. in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense, but the experience of it takes a little getting used to. nevertheless, all three of the characters and the peeks we are afforded of their lives relay a sort of anger, melancholy, poignancy, and suffering that comes with the difficulties of their experiences due to their positions in life. but at the same time, you feel a sense of love, especially with these first two perspectives, as a young jallal and saadia sacrifice and rage at the expense of slima.
there are just so many congruent feelings tied up in taïa's story that i have difficulty trying to explicate them. i suppose i'll do this chronologically (organizational wise) then. i find myself entrenched in these three people's lives, aching for them. this fervent, righteous love jallal has for his mother despite/because of her occupation feels so real, so tactile in that way, that i wait for his spit to splatter onto the ground, onto a head. the strength yet desperation required to take on the occupation his grandmother had and to pass it down to his mother as a form of love, as a way of freeing her, makes me nod along, saying yes, maybe that is kindness. but i read her daughter's tribulations so soon after and i must ask, "how could it be?" the shame, the abuse, the danger she incurs because of her profession is so much. so very much. too much to handle. ask an adolescent jallal. ask a released slima. was it worth it? was that actually freedom? and then we have our grown up jallal, detached, abandoned, and adrift. of course he's drowning. he's utterly lonely. he's been alone for too long now and he doesn't know where to put his hands. and i feel for him. i wish there was a place for him in this world. he seemingly finds it only to be misguided yet seduced. what else does he have left to live for? what does this world owe him?
i constantly struggled throughout this novel and especially during slima's confinement. i am always wary of men writing women characters because i feel like so few men can actually ever understand the magnitude of the makeup of women's lives, their interiorities. how can they when most of them are trained to view women as some kind of object or auxiliary person, if human in their eyes, at all? taïa's voice himself comes through most obviously when he writes these women's stories. they don't feel like women's voices to me really. and it really didn't when she begins to relay her terrifying encounter with the interrogators. she didn't speak of r**e like i think a woman would. it sounded more like what a man thought a woman may feel during that. and that aspect of the novel was really hard for me to discount. to speak of women's trauma like this, i need it to feel real and i need it to feel respectful and understood. otherwise, what the fuck does this all mean? the trauma and abuse these women characters endured are simply the means that explain jallal's end? fuck that
so there, all of my ambivalence bare for you to see. it was also so interesting to consider the role marilyn monroe played in this story, especially at the end there. still unsure what to make of it but i will say that i'm thinking of this novel. this story. and that's all i can really ask for from a book. -
Interesting book that is separated into parts, each one dealing with a generation of a family and/or the family as a whole. Taia's writing style took a little getting used to, but I really liked it by the end.
The parts deal with so many emotions. Jallal is the son of Slima, and his voice and experience ends up telling much of the story. The settings range from Morocco to Egypt to Belgium and back again. It's a really deep novel for being so short. It was not like anything I've read before & I recommend it. -
A beautiful story centered on Jallal; a young boy, son of a prostitute in Morocco, who is devoted to his mother while fully aware of what she must do to keep them well. As he grows he befriends Mouad, a Belgian convert to Islam who rekindles the faith in Jallal. The reborn faith and its consequences bring the story to a too quick but beautiful conclusion. I've already got other works of Taia's on my To Read Shelf, and look forward to them.
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This book had me with its powerful, poetical writing, its tragic history, its backdrop, right up until the last few chapters. Then it pulled a stunt that felt cheap and lazy. And it really dragged the whole thing down.
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I have read this book in English. I found it to be absolutely intriguing and the different points of view added a wonderful layer of authenticity.
I don’t think I have ever finished a book this quickly. It’s short to be fair but still.
Impressive work. -
An intense meditation on love, filling the void of emptiness and disrupting the empty void which passes for conventional society and religion. Beautiful essential connections are dreamed of and realised. Quite enchanting.
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I read it in one go. The entire experience of reading was if I have was dreaming this story. The translation is phenomenal and I found Taïa's language so deep and poetic. If Gabriel garcía márquez and Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote a book together that would it.
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this interesting novel keeps me reading to the end.
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Feels under written. Had this been developed more fully, the interesting bread crumbs of story could have been more fully realized. Here, there a lot of characters thinking with few actual scenes.
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3.5
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Un peu plus hermétique que les autres romans du même auteur, peut être moins colérique. Un parcours difficile d’un fils et d’une mère dans un monde qui les rejette
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Slima est une protituée marocaine. Son fils Jallal l’aide à attraper les hommes, les clients, les soldats d’une base militaire. Il parle à sa place, se bat pour elle. Tous deux résistent à la misère et aux humiliations. Ils se sont inventé une religion où cohabitent l’Islam, la sorcellerie, et des rêves nés des chansons populaires et des films. Slima est arrêtée par la police. Elle met Jallal à l’abri en l’envoyant en Egypte. Elle le rejoint et y rencontre un Belge, converti à l’Islam. Avec lui elle trouve la voie d’une ascèse qui la conduit à mourir sur la tombe du prophète à Médine. Installé à Bruxelles par l’amant de sa mère, Jallal s’y sent étranger. Révolté et rêveur, il rencontre à son tour, dans un hôpital, un européen musulman, qui le subjugue. C’est un coup de foudre où la spiritualité tient plus de place que la sensualité.
Ensemble ils partent pour Casablanca avec le projet de se faire exploser. Jallah voit dans cette
explosion une façon d’imposer au monde leur amour réprouvé et de venger sa mère. Quand il
comprend que son ami est en fait un terroriste il est trop tard.
Une écriture surprenante, un livre qui déborde d'amour, des rebondissements surprenant sur un parcours violent. Un livre excellent qui ouvre les yeux.
