Attacking Earth and Sun
A Novel
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
This searing historical fiction immerses us in the brutal early days of the 19th-century French colonization of Algeria.
The highly anticipated English-language debut of a prize-winning author who tackles the taboo of France’s colonial past.
In search of a prosperous life, Séraphine and her family brave the dangerous journey to France’s newly conquered Algerian territory, along with five hundred likeminded citizens. But the realities of the colony soon give the lie to the French government’s promises: inadequate shelter, hostile weather, sickness, and a native population whose anger and desperation threaten to boil over into violence.
As the settlers gradually, painfully establish a community and a church in this foreign land, the French army wreaks devastation on the Algerian people and their villages. Through the eyes of a soldier—constantly reminded by his captain, “You’re no angels!”—we witness their shocking cruelty as they attempt to quell resistance.
With chiseled, haunting prose reminiscent of Faulkner, Mathieu Belezi condenses years of historical research into a powerfully human account. Attacking Earth and Sun vividly exposes the hell that was colonization, far from the pioneer dream sold by Western powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French writer Belezi's scathing English-language debut depicts the early-19th-century colonization of Algeria as a Boschian tableau of arrogance and atrocity, narrated alternately by a distraught colonist and a disenchanted soldier. Séraphine is losing hope of attaining the "heaven on earth promised us by the Republic of France" while she flails on a farming settlement. Faced with an unforgiving climate, a cholera epidemic, and murderous raids by locals, she questions whether to remain in a place "blindly mapped out by a few wretched bureaucrats" and reckons with the grievous consequences of her choice to emigrate. Her sections, marked by despairing refrains ("holy Mary mother of God") are among the novel's most haunting indictments of the colonial enterprise. In the unnamed soldier's narration, the prose is more overwrought as he recounts his army's sexual assaults on Algerian villagers ("Soldiers can forget their troubles and with broad thrusts clear a path through the calcinated forests of their Bedouin bush"). Villains, too, are cartoonishly portrayed, such as the insatiable captain who proclaims, "France has been given the divine mission to pacify your barbaric lands and offer your empty brainboxes the splendors of a millennia-old culture, whether you like it or not!" For the most part, though, this mesmerizes with its righteous and often poetic anger.
