Land and Blood

Review from Shelf Awareness (2/7/2012): "Mouloud Feraoun, a friend of Albert Camus, was brutally murdered by right-wing paramilitary terrorists in 1962 during the last days of French colonial rule in Algeria. His 1953 novel, Land and Blood, now translated by Patricia Geesey, takes place in the 1930s in the small Algerian village of Ighil-Nezman, in a corner of Kabylia.

Amer is a prodigal son returning after 15 years to the village where he was born. With him is his beautiful wife, Marie, a poor Parisian starting a new life and causing quite a commotion. The Kabyles are a poverty-stricken people full of noble intentions but condemned to bitter compromises in order to survive. Their houses of mud, stone and wood must be rebuilt every two generations. Many Kabyle men go to France to work in the coal mines, where Amer caused the death of his uncle in a tragic mining accident. Marie is that uncle's suspected love-child. The man's brother is waiting for Amer in his home village, planning vengeance.

This ancient village is thick with secrets, and Feraoun reveals them one by one: the wives who have covered for impotent husbands with secret lovers, the husbands who have sidestepped infertile wives with convenient cousins, the land-swapping, the power alliances, the ruthless stepping of neighbor on neighbor. A childless couple causes wild village speculation: Amer and his French wife are childless; so are the dead man's brother and his young wife, Chabha. Four childless people, with an unresolved murder between them.

The reader watches with anxiety as matters slowly, subtly, grow out of control. Good-natured, innocent Chabha finds herself falling in love with Amer. Two interfering old women, determined to help Chabha get pregnant, set the stage for disaster. With one clan insulting another, the slanders of the women at the fountain and the insults of a drunken young man, the final third of the novel escalates the suspense as the lives of the main characters, their families and neighbors, collide.

Feraoun lyrically reveals the intricacies of Kabylian life as you learn the histories of the families that share tiny Ighil-Nezman--how they've intermarried, fought with each other, planted their fields and cared for their oxen. Part anthropological re-creation of a lost way of life, part tragic love story of a village nearly ripped apart by ancient codes of honor and conflicting allegiances, Land and Blood is a drama played out with huge stakes in a dense, richly rewarding novel memorializing a little-known world in transition. --Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: A novel from pre-independence Algeria about a blood feud and tragic adultery ripping apart a small village."

A tireless author and educator, Mouloud Feraoun (1913–1962) was assassinated by a French terrorist group only three days before the cease-fire that marked the beginning of Algerian independence. His Journal, 1955–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War was published posthumously to great acclaim. Patricia Geesey, Professor of French at the University of North Florida, has published work in journals such as the French Review, World Literature Today, and Research in African Literatures.