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Banquet of Lies general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
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Our Assessment:
B+ : overwrought, but works for the most part See our review for fuller assessment.
From the Reviews: - Return to top of the page - The complete review's Review:
Banquet of Lies is narrated by Koussaïla, as he recounts his childhood in Algeria in the 1960s.
He's torn by guilt, between the devout expectations of his family and especially his mother and his own interests (and lust).
He loves words (and reading dictionaries), and does very well at school, at least in French and maths, and does the other kids' homework for money.
But his mother considers Western literature an abomination, so he takes to reading Madame Bovary concealed within a cover of the Qu'ran.
Since the coup d'état which had ousted President Ben Bella, my uncle had completely lost his power over the family. He had become impotent.But reality only extends so far, and there's a good deal of twisting it to fit the local, more limited world-view -- most notably when the book closes with the Americans landing a man on the moon, and Koussaïla's teacher denouncing the news as a lie: a great, a mortal lie, contrived and devised to undermine Islam and its prophet MuhammadHistory -- wars and political upheaval -- takes place around him, but Koussaïla focusses on the personal, on his own stories -- his own banquet of lies. It makes for a lot of overwrought writing, but for long stretches it's surprisingly engaging. It makes for an odd -- and sexually excessive (and bizarre) -- testament of the times, but there's something to it. Admirably, the English edition is, in fact, a bilingual one. Frank Wynne's translation reads well, but with language like this there's a lot to be said for having the original side by side with the translated text. - Return to top of the page - Banquet of Lies: Reviews:
- Return to top of the page - Algerian author Amin Zaoui was born in 1956. He is currently head of the National Library in Algiers. - Return to top of the page -
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