The translation of this novel of 2016 had the awkwardness to appear mid-February 2020. The very brief period of time to be head of the gondolas here and there before the fall of the iron curtain, virus requires. It is now time to read “the City of the jackals” Parker Bilal. This geologist by training, a ” routing error “, post-mortem the egyptian company for fifteen pounds. For this he used the best arguments, the detective genre, ideal for picking the locks of a company, in half-open the shutters. Through the springs of the investigation – who, how, why, killed it disseminates the secrets, the quirks, the false pretences that describe a nation, Egypt, 2005, the dictatorship of Mubarak. The Rais is still in power, the kindling of the arab spring builds up but the spark has not yet sprung. The frustrations add up.
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A private perquisitionne the cloaca
in The morning, not far from the barge, which is Makana, a private sudanese, a fisherman dates back to a very strange parcel. The head of a teenager, barely identifiable, a cat fish having have been delighted. Moral : “do not eat fish, you never know what they are fed “. All the flavor of Parker Bilal resides in this offbeat view of the life, death, injustices and get the shovel from Cairo to Khartoum. A sudanese refugee who is beheaded, it will not move an eyebrow to the egyptian police. Police, who ” felt sometimes the need to crush someone, just to show who was boss “.
Egypt belongs to this part of the arab world where the sentence ” if you prefer inspector, I can call some of my friends in the ministry of the Interior “, says it all. The act is powder in the eyes, the police is the strong arm of a corrupt power. The author portrays a nation where sticks, religion and kleptocracy police dictate the life. Fast-food infested in the pharmaceutical industry, a garage ladle in the old palace near the square Talaat Harb, ” where Champollion lived “, we discover the small world of a youth for whom ” the studies are worthless, you will not find a job unless your father has relations in a ministry of any kind “. Then, it goes to the university to save time “. The corpse without a head start and will be joined by others.
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The community of South sudan, ” tens or hundreds of thousands “, take the figure as ” in order to punish the government in Khartoum, the Egyptians catch up with those who have fled persecution in Sudan “. Result : “the refugees take two sides “. They are ” individuals lost in a foreign corporation that despise them “.
The private advance without support, apart from the Dr Siham, a nice examiner, that he is unable to dredge, and a police officer who can’t anything against a system unfair. The author has the appetite for small details, the half-sentence that delves into a character. It is full-bodied, smeared with black ; it carries multiple topics, from organ trafficking to migrants, including the salvation is to stay “in the grey zone of anonymity” -, of small schemes to large crap of bultagia, ” the gangs of thugs paid by Mubarak “. It can be read in the first degree : an investigation with a lot of fog, coups de theatre, of brutality. Or discover, in addition to the fun of the plot, a Egypt well away from postcards. “The City of the jackals” is not like a newspaper that it leaves the choir at the foot of his chair after the reading. It is the ready.
* “the City of The jackals” Parker Bilal. Black Series, Gallimard Editions. Traduit de l’anglais par Gérard de Chergé. 464 pages.
writing will advise you
what are the revolutions in the Arab Hosni Mubarak, or when the homage is played to the indifference of the Sudan : the diaspora galvanized the revolt against Omar el-Bashir, Egypt : the tomorrows that (un)sing ?
