Novel
Je t'offrirai une gazelle
Not translated into English
Malek Haddad · 1959
Synopsis
In Paris, in the middle of the war, a manuscript left anonymously with a publisher falls into the hands of Gisèle Duroc, the publisher's wife. It tells of the love of Moulay, driver for a trans-Saharan trucking company in the Tassili n'Ajjer, and Yaminata, a young Tuareg woman to whom he has promised to bring back a live gazelle; while he hunts with his greaser Ali, Kabèche, a favourite of the officers, asks for the girl's hand. Troubled, Gisèle looks for the author, a solitary poet who hardly frequents anywhere but Monsieur Maurice's bistro.
Context
The novel was published by Julliard in 1959. Two narratives are interwoven in it, that of the Parisian writer and that of the story he is writing, whose first chapter forms the opening of the book: in Paris as in the Sahara, each pursues his own chimera, and the first can offer the woman who loves him only a stuffed gazelle. The Paris round-ups and the distance that the war places between the two shores surface in it. Salah Garmadi translated it into Arabic in Tunis in 1968, and the book was reissued in paperback, then republished in Constantine.
Who it is for
A short novel of about a hundred and twenty-five pages, in French. It is worth knowing that two stories alternate in it without warning, and that its sentence is that of a poet.
Prizes and reception
The most widely read of its author's novels, translated into Arabic as early as 1968 and reissued in paperback in France in 1978.