- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; UK First Edition; 1st printing. edition (18 Jan 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1408800179
- ISBN-13: 978-1408800171
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 563,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
An Unfinished Business
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Review
'In his desire to denounce injustice, lies and diktats of all kinds, to fight against amnesia and historical revisionism, but also to remember, nothing seems able to stop Boualem Sansal. Neither the violent reviews which he has received in his own country, nor the censorship to which his most recent books have been subjected One of the events of the literary season.' Christine Rousseau, (headline review in) Le Monde 'One has to understand that in the Arab-Muslim countries, the Shoah is generally disregarded, sometimes played down or even denied altogether. In breaking this taboo, Boualem Sansal tries to make understood to his own people that this momentous event in Jewish memory is also a metaphysical question that concerns all human beings. [An Unfinished Business] is to be hailed for its virtuoso structure and its concern for the universal and its political courage.' Les Inrockuptibles
Review
'In his desire to denounce injustice, lies and diktats of all kinds, to fight against amnesia and historical revisionism, but also to remember, nothing seems able to stop Boualem Sansal. Neither the violent reviews which he has received in his own country, nor the censorship to which his most recent books have been subjected ... One of the events of the literary season.' Christine Rousseau, (headline review in) Le Monde 'One has to understand that in the Arab-Muslim countries, the Shoah is generally disregarded, sometimes played down or even denied altogether. In breaking this taboo, Boualem Sansal tries to make understood to his own people that this momentous event in Jewish memory is also a metaphysical question that concerns all human beings. [An Unfinished Business] is to be hailed for its virtuoso structure and its concern for the universal and its political courage.' Les Inrockuptibles
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Boualem Sansal's novel begins with a poem by Primo Levi. The book takes its lead from this and other work by Levi to try to make sense of the way in which ordinary men apparently take leave of their senses to commit extraordinary acts of horror.
The book is written in a diary format and slips between the diary written by Rachel Schiller, a successfully assimilated French businessman, and that of his brother Malrich an Algerian immigrant on a rough estate. Both have lived in France for the bulk of their lives, leaving their Algerian mother and German father in a remote village in Algeria. Neither have ever looked back to the lives they left behind being too caught up in their everyday trials and tribulations. Then their parents are killed during the war in Algeria and Rachel's return to his home village unearths a terrible family secret about his father's past.
Sansal's novel sets out to do something truly unusual. He is not only writing about the holocaust, in often graphic detail to ensure that everyone knows exactly what happened to the Jews, but he is also writing about modern fundamentalism. He wants to draw parrallels between the condemnatory stances of both Nazism and all forms of fundamentalism. He wants to show how easily people become part of the exploitative political climate simply because its easier than resisting. In looking at their father's past, Malrich Schiller is forced to look at the environment he lives in, at the pressures he endures from the resident imam and local police chief. In revisiting their native village, both brothers are compelled to see war-torn Algeria through the lens of Nazi Germany.
There has been so much written about the holocaust and there are increasing amounts of literature looking at the place of fundamentalist religions in the modern world. To read something so challenging on both those subjects is genuinely new. The reader is challenged to think the unthinkable at times about the modern world, challenged to ask themselves whether they would stand up to political oppression, challenged to understand those who are swept along with history's horrors. Yet at no point does Sansal seek to condone the actions of the oppressors, his novel deals with atonement and contrition through deep understanding and asks the age-old question of how much the crimes of the father must be revisited on the son.
This is a well-written story, with plenty of tension and a range of interesting, credible characters, yet ultimately, this is a novel designed to leave you with questions, designed to leave you to think. It is by its very nature 'unfinished'.
The book is written in a diary format and slips between the diary written by Rachel Schiller, a successfully assimilated French businessman, and that of his brother Malrich an Algerian immigrant on a rough estate. Both have lived in France for the bulk of their lives, leaving their Algerian mother and German father in a remote village in Algeria. Neither have ever looked back to the lives they left behind being too caught up in their everyday trials and tribulations. Then their parents are killed during the war in Algeria and Rachel's return to his home village unearths a terrible family secret about his father's past.
Sansal's novel sets out to do something truly unusual. He is not only writing about the holocaust, in often graphic detail to ensure that everyone knows exactly what happened to the Jews, but he is also writing about modern fundamentalism. He wants to draw parrallels between the condemnatory stances of both Nazism and all forms of fundamentalism. He wants to show how easily people become part of the exploitative political climate simply because its easier than resisting. In looking at their father's past, Malrich Schiller is forced to look at the environment he lives in, at the pressures he endures from the resident imam and local police chief. In revisiting their native village, both brothers are compelled to see war-torn Algeria through the lens of Nazi Germany.
There has been so much written about the holocaust and there are increasing amounts of literature looking at the place of fundamentalist religions in the modern world. To read something so challenging on both those subjects is genuinely new. The reader is challenged to think the unthinkable at times about the modern world, challenged to ask themselves whether they would stand up to political oppression, challenged to understand those who are swept along with history's horrors. Yet at no point does Sansal seek to condone the actions of the oppressors, his novel deals with atonement and contrition through deep understanding and asks the age-old question of how much the crimes of the father must be revisited on the son.
This is a well-written story, with plenty of tension and a range of interesting, credible characters, yet ultimately, this is a novel designed to leave you with questions, designed to leave you to think. It is by its very nature 'unfinished'.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Boualem Sansal, An Unfinished Business
It's taken three years for Boualem Sansal's Le village de l'Allemand to arrive here as an English paperback, translated disappointingly as An Unfinished Business. I often wonder why publishers find it necessary to change or mistranslate titles. Well, in this case the answer is that Primo Levi, renowned for his concentration camp memoir If This is a Man. later wrote a poem, translated from the Italian as `Unfinished Business.'
The poem preludes this novel.first done in French,with Italian overtones, translated into English and written by an Algerian about a German camp commandant who escaped trial and after becoming a folk hero in the battle for Algerian independence lived a serene life in Egypt until slaughtered by Islamists In Algeria.
A search for the truth behind their father's wartime activities possesses two brothers who have been abandoned on a sink estate in the Paris suburbs. The sons, themselves under threat from the fanatical Islamists who rule the estate, in turn make the trek, first to the bled, where their father was a hero, then to Auschwitz, where `in four short years, 1,300,000 men, women and children, 90 per cent of them Jews, were tossed into the furnaces - an average of a thousand souls a day, the equivalent of a village wiped off the map, house by house, family by family, between daybreak and sunset.' Thus the elder son's diary, read after his suicide by his younger brother who, in his turn, is impelled to take the same journey of discovery.
The thematic connection between Nazi atrocity and Islamic terrorism is endemic to Sansal's novel, which like all his work is banned in his own country. Indeed, in 2003 he was dismissed from his Algerian government job for criticising the regime. Lately public uprisings in repressive Islamic states are seen on our screens every day. And in the novel the sorting, interrogation and torture of waiting at Algiers airport reminds the protagonist and the reader forcibly of the treatment of the concentration camp victims of World War Two. Between the police and the imams the huddled immigrants starve and struggle for breath. This is a horrific and terrifying look back and forward as power-hungry rulers are warped by ideology and racism and bigotry crushes the spirit of man.
It's taken three years for Boualem Sansal's Le village de l'Allemand to arrive here as an English paperback, translated disappointingly as An Unfinished Business. I often wonder why publishers find it necessary to change or mistranslate titles. Well, in this case the answer is that Primo Levi, renowned for his concentration camp memoir If This is a Man. later wrote a poem, translated from the Italian as `Unfinished Business.'
The poem preludes this novel.first done in French,with Italian overtones, translated into English and written by an Algerian about a German camp commandant who escaped trial and after becoming a folk hero in the battle for Algerian independence lived a serene life in Egypt until slaughtered by Islamists In Algeria.
A search for the truth behind their father's wartime activities possesses two brothers who have been abandoned on a sink estate in the Paris suburbs. The sons, themselves under threat from the fanatical Islamists who rule the estate, in turn make the trek, first to the bled, where their father was a hero, then to Auschwitz, where `in four short years, 1,300,000 men, women and children, 90 per cent of them Jews, were tossed into the furnaces - an average of a thousand souls a day, the equivalent of a village wiped off the map, house by house, family by family, between daybreak and sunset.' Thus the elder son's diary, read after his suicide by his younger brother who, in his turn, is impelled to take the same journey of discovery.
The thematic connection between Nazi atrocity and Islamic terrorism is endemic to Sansal's novel, which like all his work is banned in his own country. Indeed, in 2003 he was dismissed from his Algerian government job for criticising the regime. Lately public uprisings in repressive Islamic states are seen on our screens every day. And in the novel the sorting, interrogation and torture of waiting at Algiers airport reminds the protagonist and the reader forcibly of the treatment of the concentration camp victims of World War Two. Between the police and the imams the huddled immigrants starve and struggle for breath. This is a horrific and terrifying look back and forward as power-hungry rulers are warped by ideology and racism and bigotry crushes the spirit of man.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
Haunted by the Past
20 April 2011
Format:Paperback
Boualem Sansal,
An Unfinished Business
It's taken three years for Boualem Sansal's Le village de l'Allemand to arrive here as an English paperback, translated disappointingly as An Unfinished Business. I often wonder why publishers find it necessary to change or mistranslate titles. Well, in this case the answer is that Primo Levi renowned for his concentration camp memoir If This is a Man later wrote a poem, translated from the Italian as `Unfinished Business.' The poem preludes this novel.
French, Italian, English and written by an Algerian about a German camp commandant who escaped trial and after becoming a folk hero in the battle for Algerian independence lived a serene life in Egypt until slaughtered by Islamists In Algeria. A search for the truth behind their father's wartime activities possesses two brothers who have been abandoned on a sink estate in the Paris suburbs. The sons, themselves under threat from the fanatical Islamists who rule the estate, in turn make the trek, first to the bled, where their father was a hero, then to Auschwitz, where `in four short years, 1,300,000 men, women and children, 90 per cent of them Jews, were tossed into the furnaces - an average of a thousand souls a day, the equivalent of a village wiped off the map, house by house, family by family, between daybreak and sunset.' Thus the elder son's diary, read after his suicide by his younger brother who, in his turn, is impelled to take the same journey of discovery.
The parallel between Nazi atrocity and Islamic terrorism is endemic to Sansal's novel, which like all his work is banned in his own country. Indeed, in 2003 he was dismissed from his Algerian government job for criticising the regime. Public uprisings in repressive Islamic states are seen on our screens every day. The sorting, interrogation and torture of waiting at Algiers airport reminds us forcibly of the treatment of the concentration camp victims of World War Two. Between the police and the imams the huddled immigrants starve and struggle for breath. This is a horrific and terrifying look back and forward as power-hungry rulers are warped by ideology and racism and bigotry crush the spirit of man.
An Unfinished Business
It's taken three years for Boualem Sansal's Le village de l'Allemand to arrive here as an English paperback, translated disappointingly as An Unfinished Business. I often wonder why publishers find it necessary to change or mistranslate titles. Well, in this case the answer is that Primo Levi renowned for his concentration camp memoir If This is a Man later wrote a poem, translated from the Italian as `Unfinished Business.' The poem preludes this novel.
French, Italian, English and written by an Algerian about a German camp commandant who escaped trial and after becoming a folk hero in the battle for Algerian independence lived a serene life in Egypt until slaughtered by Islamists In Algeria. A search for the truth behind their father's wartime activities possesses two brothers who have been abandoned on a sink estate in the Paris suburbs. The sons, themselves under threat from the fanatical Islamists who rule the estate, in turn make the trek, first to the bled, where their father was a hero, then to Auschwitz, where `in four short years, 1,300,000 men, women and children, 90 per cent of them Jews, were tossed into the furnaces - an average of a thousand souls a day, the equivalent of a village wiped off the map, house by house, family by family, between daybreak and sunset.' Thus the elder son's diary, read after his suicide by his younger brother who, in his turn, is impelled to take the same journey of discovery.
The parallel between Nazi atrocity and Islamic terrorism is endemic to Sansal's novel, which like all his work is banned in his own country. Indeed, in 2003 he was dismissed from his Algerian government job for criticising the regime. Public uprisings in repressive Islamic states are seen on our screens every day. The sorting, interrogation and torture of waiting at Algiers airport reminds us forcibly of the treatment of the concentration camp victims of World War Two. Between the police and the imams the huddled immigrants starve and struggle for breath. This is a horrific and terrifying look back and forward as power-hungry rulers are warped by ideology and racism and bigotry crush the spirit of man.
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