Novel
Le Grain dans la meule
Not translated into English
Malek Ouary · 1956
Synopsis
In a village in Kabylia, a young man kills his cousin. Custom requires the dead man's two brothers to kill him in turn; on the advice of the sheikh, he flees and lives in hiding. Exile weighs on him more than the threat, and he finally returns to give himself up to those who are looking for him. The father of his victim then makes him a proposal that no custom had foreseen.
Context
Ten years spent recording the songs and tales of his region for the Algiers station gave the author the material for the book: the village assembly, the authority of the sheikh, the blood price, the customs of mourning, detailed as the plot unfolds. Corrêa and Buchet-Chastel published it in Paris in 1956, two years after the outbreak of the insurrection. French critics saw in it above all an initiation into Berber customs; Charles Bonn would later place it among the books of the tragic tension between two worlds. Mohamed Ifticène made a television adaptation of it for Algerian television in 1983, under a new title, and Bouchène reissued it in 2000.
Who it is for
Two hundred pages in French, with many Kabyle words left as they are. It helps to know that the vendetta here is not a device of suspense but a procedure, whose every stage is followed.
Prizes and reception
It found critics and public at once, and remains the title by which its author is known, ahead of the two novels he published twenty-five years later.