Retaliation underground

Retaliation underground (La Terre et le sang) is a 1953 published novel of the writer Mouloud Feraoun .

"When a Kabyle returns to his mountains after a long absence, the time he spent somewhere else seems to him only like a dream. This dream may be good or bad, but he only finds reality in himself, in his own House, in his village. The village is a grouping of houses, and the houses are made of a structure of stones, earth and wood. It is difficult to imagine the naive intervention of the masonry man in it. They could have grown by themselves, the way they present themselves to their inhabitants, this would not be a miracle on this ungracious earth, where everyone vegetates and at the end finds their sleep under a slate. " (Page 8 of the German edition from 2000, translated by Tilmann Hannemann)

content

The Kabyle Amer leaves his homeland to work in France. At the beginning he often thinks about his homeland and his family, whom he supports with regular transfers. But soon the Moloch Paris suppressed the images of the past, even the donations of money Amer finally stopped. The old father who had put all his hopes in his son dies completely alone. When Amer returns home completely unexpectedly, accompanied by a French woman, the amazement is great ... (cover text of the German edition from 2000)

literature

• Angela Schader: virtuoso of limitation. Mouloud Feraoun opens up a Kabyle village world . Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 9, 2000

"Here the events grow quietly, and not always as expected, under the humus of everyday life, from whose sparse the author gains his own literary wealth: be it in the sovereignly captured color of village life, be it in the brittle but sympathetic reflections about poverty. (...) A writer needs the ingenuity of an acrobat to give this village square the size of the palm of a hand a certain width, to let adventures and dramas take place in these alleys that are so narrow that not even two thoughts get past each other. "