Of our wounded brothers
Joseph Andras
Translated Alex Gibert
Anagram
136 pages €17.90
Algiers, 1956. The war of independence has been ravaging the country for two years. As in any conflict, there are not only two sides, but there are grays, a palette of nuances that fans hate. Fernand Iveton is Algerian, but not Muslim, and, a big mistake, he is not part of the country’s white majority in favor of the survival of the colony. There lies his sin, not in his act, the placing of a bomb that does not even explode, but in his betrayal. And traitors, in dictatorships and – surprise – in some democracies, deserve the same end, capital punishment. The patient and meticulous record of the inexorable gears that lead to that destination – by Joseph Andras who writes with the Omitted History at the tip of his pen – takes up what it should take up, just 130 very necessary pages.
It is guillotined. The protagonist of this story, Fernand Iveton, is ultimately guillotined. Knowing this is crucial for reading, and I am not saying it here, but rather the back cover itself advances it: our hero will die before becoming a hero, and keeping this in mind while we read the text injects into each sentence a tension that is not that of not knowing where it will take us, but rather, perplexed, asking ourselves again and again: how is it possible that this story is going to end the way I know it is going to end? How can things be twisted in such a way that everything precipitates the official beheading, by the state that champions human rights, democracy and freedom in the entire world, namely France, of a citizen who has not killed to anyone?
Of the many powers that literature has, perhaps the most paradoxical is that of, through the narration of horror, caressing beauty. The result is astonishing: a challenge to oblivion so that the ominous does not rest in peace. Of course, few novels achieve this without falling into the frivolity of instrumentalizing the pain of others, dressing it up as suits the author. I can think of few names, and Joseph Andras is among them. Guillem Borrero
#wounded #brothers #Librujula
