At the heart of the turbulence of the contemporary world, with Anouar Benmalek
Audio 04:12
Anouar Benmalek is a novelist, poet and essayist.
He has just published his new novel L'Amour au temps des scélérats, published by Emmanuelle Collas.
© Francesco Gattoni
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
10 mins
Mathematician converted to literature for the beautiful eyes of a Ukrainian, Algerian Anouar Benmalek has established himself as one of the major writers of Algerian literature in the French language.
He writes a committed work, the material of which is inspired by the turbulences of the contemporary world, but also by his unique family history.
He has just published, with Emmanuelle Collas editions, his tenth novel
L'Amour au temps des scélérats
.
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“
I could not not write.
When I am not writing, I have an almost metaphysical anxiety to the point of wondering what I am doing on this earth.
I have to write, much like the smoker who has to smoke or the drunk who has to drink.
I have to write.
So says the Algerian novelist Anouar Benmalek.
The Algerian is not the first to evoke this irrepressible need to write.
Others have said it and repeated it before him.
We think in particular of Beckett who said that he wrote because he was "
only good at that
", or of Gabriel Garcia Marquez from whom is inspired,
Love in the time of the scoundrels
, the new novel by Anouar Benmalek.
The tyrant "
with the giraffe neck
"
This new opus is perhaps one of the most ambitious works of fiction of this literary re-entry 2021. With an abundant imagination, it summons the past and the present, the prophet Abraham and Bashar al-Assad - the tyrant "
in giraffe neck
”-, the Sumerian civilization and the Yazidis, victims of a modern genocide passed in silence. Somewhere between Turkey and Syria, a strange character, an unlikely candidate for jihad, shows up at the border post. Enigmatic and timeless, Tammouz who lives over several centuries is not a hero of flesh and blood, but an idea, the metaphor of our part of humanity scorned through the ages by the powerful. The latter are not, however, the only scoundrels portrayed in the novel.
“
Scoundrels are everywhere
,” explains the author,
and there are all kinds. There is the obvious villain, it is the killers, whether they are on one side or the other, either in Daesh or in the Arab governments, whether they are for example among the users of drones who kill at distance into small crime official. I had read a book on drones titled "We kill because we can". No one considers these bureaucratic killings a crime because it is the act of a great power. There are also scoundrels among ordinary people, those who tacitly support criminals. Daesh was able to exist not only because there were Daesh killers, but because part of the populations in the Arab world did not find them that bad. Scoundrels are everywhere!
"
Love in the days of the scoundrels
"
is not a novel about Daesh or devastated Syria
," warns the author. The turbulences of our world that the protagonists of his story face are the canvas on which powerful feelings of love, mourning, and ambition unfold, which are perhaps the true subjects of this novel both epic and picaresque. These feelings are especially embodied by the protagonist Tammouz, who turns out to be a character of classical tragedy, hiding in his immemorial heart the memory of his beloved. "
It is also a romance novel
," recalls the author.
I wanted to write a Mesopotamian version both contemporary and ancient of Tristan and Iseut, of Kaïs and Leïla, of Romeo and Juliet, but immersed in this atmosphere of murder.
At the same time, it brings us back to the great monotheistic religions in which there is a kind of fascination for Abraham, which raises the big question: how can we sacrifice what we hold most dear for or for a supreme being, in not asking questions.
"
"Mediterranean Faulkner"
Both a love novel, a tale and a fable,
L'Amour au temps des scélérats
is above all the work of an artist at the height of his art.
Qualified as a “
Mediterranean Faulkner
”, Anouar Benmalek is the author of around fifteen books.
He is a novelist, but also a poet, short story writer, essayist.
His novels draw their material as much from his native Algeria of the author as from questions with universal resonances, leading his readers to distant geographical territories such as Damascus, Beirut, Los Angeles or even the herero country of Namibia.
Among his most famous novels, we must mention
The Son of Sheol
(2015),
The Child of the Ancient People
(2000) or
0 Maria
(2006), award-winning works, translated into many languages.
Anouar Benmalek became known in 1998, by publishing his first novel
Les Amants désunis
(1998), inspired by the extraordinary life story of his Swiss grandmother. She was a trapeze artist and had met her husband during a circus tour in Algiers. This tragic love story, told in retrospect, against a background of the drift of a shipwrecked Algeria, revealed an outstanding storyteller, anxious to show a humanity still in the making, torn between conscience and survival reflex. The writer is considered "
the most talented Algerian novelist since Kateb Yacine
", recalls his editor.
Born in 1956 from a mixed marriage between an Algerian father and a Moroccan mother, Anouar Benmalek grew up in Constantine, Algeria.
He likes to say that nothing predestined him for a literary career.
Lover of science from an early age, he dedicated himself to a career as a mathematician.
“
At the time, my gods were called Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, of whom I had pictures in my room,
” he recalls.
The taste for writing came when in Kiev, in the 1970s, he was preparing a thesis in mathematics.
The author has often recounted the romantic and incredible circumstances of his coming to writing: “
I came to writing through amorous opportunism. I had had a crush on a girl and that, mathematician and very poor to try to dazzle the girl he loves, I got into poetry, bad poetry. Then, I moved on to the short story and then to the novel. The funny thing about this story is that this girl who made me become a novelist, she was actually a real mythomaniac. She told me that she spoke Sanskrit, that she painted icons, that she did artistic photography and other things. I actually found out that she was a real mythomaniac. But I don't blame him. On the contrary, I am deeply grateful to him for having in turn allowed me to become a mythomaniac because, as you know, a novelist is a bit of a mythomaniac.
"
Today, professor of probability and statistics in a university in France where he has lived for twenty years, the feverish former flirtatious of the beautiful Ukrainian divides his time between what he calls his "
two loves
": maths and literature.
He regularly returns to Algeria, which he had to leave in the midst of the civil war, after the assassination by the Islamists of his friend and "
soul brother
", the writer Tahar Djaout.
► Love in the days of scoundrels
, by Anouar Benmalek.
Éditions Emmanuelle Collas, 2021, 456 pages, 20 euros.
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