Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010-2016

by Kamel Daoud, Elisabeth Zerofsky (Translator)

Overview

This engaging collection of essays showcases the extraordinary passion, insight, and range of Kamel Daoud, bestselling author of The Meursault Investigation.

Kamel Daoud has been a journalist for more than twenty years, writing the most-read column in Algeria, in Le Quotidien d'Oran, while also collaborating on various online media and contributing to foreign publications such as the New York Times. During the 2010-2016 period, he put his name to almost two thousand texts--first intended for the Algerian public, then read more and more throughout the world as his reputation grew.

Whether he is criticizing political Islam or the decline of the Algerian regime, embracing the hope kindled by Arab revolutions or defending women's rights, Daoud does so in his own inimitable style: at once poetic and provocative, he captures his devoted followers with fresh, counterintuitive arguments about the nature of humanity, religion, and liberty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590519578
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Kamel Daoud is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for the Quotidien d’Oran—the third largest French-language Algerian newspaper. He contributes a weekly column to Le Point, and his articles have appeared in Libération, Le Monde, Courrier International, and are regularly reprinted around the world. A finalist for the Prix Goncourt, The Meursault Investigation won the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq-Continents de la francophonie. International rights to the novel have been sold in twenty countries. A dramatic adaptation of The Meursault Investigation was performed at the 2015 Festival d’Avignon, and a feature film was released in 2017.

Elisabeth Zerofsky‘s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, The New Republic, and Harper’s. She is a graduate of Brown University and was a Fulbright fellow in Paris from 2008 to 2009.

Editorial Reviews

09/15/2018
Algerian journalist Daoud, whose debut novel, The Meursault Investigation, won France's Prix Goncourt in 2015, began his career as a columnist for the Algerian French-language daily Le Quotidien d'Oran, going on to write for major publications such as Le Monde, Le Point, and the New York Times. This compilation of short newspaper columns and critical essays published between 2010 and 2016 features themes that include the need for modernizing voices in the Muslim world, political Islam and reactionary extremism, fundamentalism and zealotry, tolerance and the secular ideal, women's rights, hopes kindled by the Arab Spring revolution, the migrant and refugee crisis, and the state of Algeria's political and religious authorities. Most of the pieces are shrewd and sharp but not without controversy. Nevertheless, to Daoud's fans, he is a champion for speaking unpleasant truths relentlessly, even recklessly—not from exile but from his country's home base. While Zerofsky's introduction and appended glossary are helpful, footnotes and background material would have provided beneficial context for each of the essays. VERDICT These thought-provoking writings will appeal to readers interested in geopolitical events in one of the most troubled regions of the world. [See Prepub Alert, 4/30/18.]—Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal

Daoud is a brilliant, indeed dazzling, thinker…[Chroniques is] sharp, smart, and searingly felt, demonstrating breathtaking understanding of both the world of letters and life experience. Daoud’s essays are literally death-defying, often painful, and always deeply thoughtful.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Daoud…offers unsparing critiques of political Islam, Arab dictatorships, Western complicity, and social and cultural repression…A stunning, defiant, and impassioned collection.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Incisive, occasionally witty and always irreverent, Daoud’s pen spares no one…Daoud’s courage in confronting the Algerian state is particularly commendable.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Shrewd and sharp…These thought-provoking writings will appeal to readers interested in geopolitical events in one of the most troubled regions of the world.” —Library Journal

“Nothing of Kamel Daoud’s exquisite prose is lost in translation in this brilliant English edition of his collected essays. Daoud is our interpreter and critic of the Arab—and by extension, Islamic—world, and no one, from the Islamists to the dictators to every rogue in between, is immune from his pointed jabs.” —Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

“Chroniques offers an astute and sobering critique of a region besieged by a fatalistic adherence to religious dogma and by tyrannical rule disguised as national stability. Kamel Daoud has the audacity to think differently, to confront Islamism and oppression, to reflect judiciously on a people and a region that he intimately understands, and to deconstruct the myth of an ‘Arab’ identity. Daoud’s acumen is matched only by his linguistic prowess and his use of elegant prose to unpack delicate and contentious questions of our times.” —Safwan M. Masri, author of Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly

Praise for The Meursault Investigation:

“Stunning…an intricately layered tale that…nudges us into a contemplation of Algeria’s history and current religious politics; colonialism and postcolonialism; and the ways in which language and perspective can radically alter a seemingly simple story and the social and philosophical shadows it casts backward and forward.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
 
“Mesmerizing…an absorbing, independent story and a shrewd critique of a country trapped in history’s time warp.” —Wall Street Journal
 
“Rich and inventive…so convincing and so satisfying that we no longer think of the original story as the truth, but rather come to question it.” —New York Times Book Review
 
“Remarkable…[The Meursault Investigation’s] themes of voicelessness and vengeance feel utterly present-day.” —Vogue
 
“A tour-de-force.” —The New Yorker

“What makes Daoud’s book so good is that, steeped in independent thinking, it offers an illuminating, if controversial portrait of today’s Algeria.” —Fresh Air, NPR
 
“A biting, profound response to French colonialism…Daoud’s prose is propulsive and charged. The pages glitter with memorable phrases.” —The Economist

From the Publisher

★ 2018-07-17
Incisive essays depict a world beset by "a geography of hysteria."In a selection of commentary published between 2010 and 2016, journalist and novelist Daoud (The Meursault Investigation, 2015), columnist for the French-language Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d'Oran as well as contributor to many international publications, offers unsparing critiques of political Islam, Arab dictatorships, Western complicity, and social and cultural repression. As translator Zerofsky notes in an informative introduction, Daoud's writings have earned him respect as "a commentator who could both speak for and criticize" the Arab world: "a Muslim and an Algerian, a member of a postcolonial society but distanced from it by the privilege of his position and his intellect." He also became reviled for his views on Islamists and was condemned as an Islamophobe. In 2014, an imam called for a fatwa against him for "apostasy." Daoud sees Islamists as religious fanatics, "an armed force, belligerent for war," spawned from dictatorships. Islamists emerge "when you infantilize a population for decades, when you deculture them, reduce them to ignorance and take them back to the Middle Ages." Violence, intolerance, and oppression of women reflect Islamists' unease with difference, desire, and even with life. "For him life is a waste of time, blocking his way to eternity," and women, the source of life, are the enemy. "The Islamist wants to veil woman to forget her, to deny her, disembody her, escape her," Daoud writes in one among many essays denouncing societies that force women "to live under the laws of live burial." Some essays respond to particular events, such as terrorist attacks in Paris, Arab refugees' aggression against women in Cologne, and the death of a 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish child, drowned at sea, whose photograph shocked the world. Who is guilty for that death? "The smugglers, ISIS, Assad and his father, the Russians, Bush, and the Iranian regime: it's a chain reaction" that reflects pernicious complexities. "When Aylan drowns, it's the world that's in shipwreck."A stunning, defiant, and impassioned collection.

Kirkus Reviews