Novel
Agadir
Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine · 1967
Synopsis
A young social security civil servant is sent to a town razed by an earthquake, to process the claims of the victims and assess the reconstruction. He discovers that there is “not the slightest hint of a town”, soon forgets the framework of his mission and finds himself assailed by visions: a population of “more than domesticated animals”, subjected to the tyranny of the king and the corruption of those in power, a father who bequeathed nothing but fear, and two figures of hope, the grandfather and the Kahina, the Berber queen who resisted the Arabs.
Context
The book was published by Seuil in 1967, seven years after the earthquake of 29 February 1960, which killed more than twelve thousand people, and received the prix des Enfants terribles, founded in honour of Jean Cocteau. Its author drew on his years of investigation in the city. Critics speak of a “tremor of text”: monologues without punctuation, descriptions, inner voices and theatre dialogues are set side by side like sections of ruined walls. Jean-Louis Joubert, in the Encyclopædia Universalis, sees in it the matrix of the writer's entire work.
Who it is for
A short text, but one that changes form without warning; the difficulty lies in this instability rather than in the vocabulary.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in Morocco in 2024 by Le Fennec, in a box set of seven works by its author, and translated into English in 2020.
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