Les Chercheurs d'os par Tahar Djaout (review)

This is a useful student introduction to an important work of francophone Algerian literature. Tahar Djaout is one of the most sophisticated and provocative Algerian writers of the postcolonial period, who boldly voiced his critique of postcolonial Algerian politics and culture through his poetry and novels. Born in Kabylia in 1954, Djaout published five major novels and several collections of poetry, but was brutally assassinated in 1993, purportedly by the Groupe islamique armé, although there have also been allegations that the state was responsible. Les Chercheurs d'os (1984) is his best-known work; it recounts the story of a community setting off in search for the bones of the martyrs of the War of Independence while using the figure of the bone-seekers to denounce the false adulation of past heroes and the stultification of contemporary society. Belaı¨d Djefel's study provides the student with contextual information about Djaout's life and work, and explores some of the main characters and questions raised by the text. The study grows in sophistication as it progresses, with early chapters summarizing Djaout's other novels and offering an overview of the plot of Les Chercheurs, and later chapters examining broader themes, characters, and language and structural features. In particular, Djefel's reading is provocative in its insistence that 'le roman déploie ainsi les potentialités d'une exploration éthique des ambiguïtés et des impasses propres à la vie humaine' (p. 69), but that it does so without conveying a clear-cut moral view. He also explores the significance of the child's perspective, in Les Chercheurs and elsewhere in Djaout's œuvre, as a symbol of innocence and imagination, set against the disillusionment with which the novel ends. The commentary on the ambiguous symbolism of the sun at the end of the study also conveys this sense of a struggle between a vision of new life and the legacy of the destruction caused by the war. This little guide is not a research work but it does provide a helpful account of the key questions raised by an important text and should certainly be recommended to students working on Djaout.