Tahar Djaout,The Last Summer of Reason. Marjolijn de Jager, translator. Ruminator Books, 1999/2003.
Tahar Djaout was an Algerian writer who was shot outside of his home by the Armed Islamic Group for his support of secularism and his criticism of fanaticism. A BBC documentary was made about his life called Shooting the Writer, which was, rather prophetically, introduced by Salman Rushdie, who has recently published his memoir about his brush with death, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Stab writers. Shoot writers. Silence them. Djaout and Rushdie stand as examples of the struggle for freedom of expression and freedom of the imagination.
Wole Soyinka wrote the Forward to The Last Summer of Reason, declaiming against the destructive intolerance that comes from ideology and religion, the willingness to sacrifice people individually and humanity generally for the sake of a narrow abstract belief: “The life-and-death discourse of the twenty-first century is unambiguously the discourse of fanaticism and intolerance.” Although, Djaout did not write these words, they speak to the purpose of The Last Summer of Reason.
The is the second bookstore novel that I have read recently. The first was the Galician Manuel Rivas’ The Last Days of Terranova, which I reviewed in September 2023. If Rivas’s novel is the story of an enduring resistance to fascism and censorship, The Last Summer of Reason is a tragic story about the inexorable defeat of freedom of thought and expression in the face of overwhelming intolerance.
The novel is about Boualem Dekker, a bookstore owner in an unnamed city in an unnamed country suffering a fundamentalist religious revolution. In the course of The Last Summer of Reason, Boualem is stripped of everyone and everything in his life, most poignantly the store full of books. Initially, Boualem can manage within this oppressive system, because he is unassuming and not an important figure. He is not a writer of books, does not create beauty, but is only a seller of books, so he can skirt through the city doing business without anyone of significance–i.e., the Vigilant Brothers, the religious police–noticing him. He is estranged from the world and feels he is living in a place of anonymous time, but he sweats out every road block waiting for the hammer to fall, because he knows the country is now run by what Djaout visualizes as The Omniscient Eye–like Foucault’s Panopticon or Tolkien’s Sauron–which illuminates everything, stripping it of everything and subordinating it to unquestioning faith, thought, and behavior.
Boualem’s “invisible” existence allows him to maintain his freedom of thought and imagination, a modicum of resistance, and during the last summer of reason, after which there are no seasons and no time, he takes his family on a vacation to an obscure beach, where they would not be under the gaze of the Omniscient Eye or the Vigilant Brothers. The relief/escape, though, is short-lived, for on the way home they witness the religious police doing its nasty work. It feels as if they net is closing, and while Boualem has the endurance to resist further his family embraces the fanaticism and leave him. He is alone, and his only companions are the books in his shop and his one steady customer, Ali Elbouliga, who plays the mandolin, one of those instruments of joy, culture and humanity that the new regime despises.
The most dangerous point in the story is when Boualem let’s down his guard. He is on an errand to retrieve some books. He thinks about the current leader, who has no books, and, as someone who loves books, Boualem feels utterly disconnected from him. Feeling this alienation, Boualem notices a hitchhiker and decides to pick him up, a compassionate, humane, neighborly act. The man is a fanatic, though, yet Boualem is happy to engage him in conversation/argument, questioning the man’s certainties to provoke some critical thinking and thoughtful interplay. Boualem just needed to talk to someone. The young man, though, is only willing to think and speak in certainties, and he responds to Boualem by judging him. When Boualem attempts familiarity and asks the young man if he has a fiancee the young man becomes nervous and raises his guard, but before he departs he scolds Boualem for not unquestioningly embracing faith. In the world of the Omniscient Eye, Boualem realizes that this conversation may have put him in danger. Solitude is a weakness.
The novel represents a slow, inexorable trap. At the macro-level, there is the Omniscient Eye, the Vigilant Brothers, the politicians who criticize science and subjugate it to holy truth, and the media that repeats that truth. At the local, there are the children who, caught up in fanatical beliefs and egged on by their fanatical parents, taunt and throw stones at Boualem. Children are the executors of a religious will which has been foisted upon them. Boualem realizes that he has been seen and the net tightens. The children remind Boualem of Koranic school, the mindless memorization of suras and being beaten. Boualem prefers Arab literature, which allows him to think and imagine, to travel beyond the confines of parroting faith, but his life now mirrors the trap of that old childhood trauma more than the adult freedoms to which he has been accustomed.
Most poignantly, the closing trap provokes a dream: Boualem is driving into the city at night and gets caught in a giant traffic jam; he finds himself confronted by the religious police, one of which is his son Kamal. He is taken to a tribunal where he watches a man extravagantly humiliate himself. When he sees Kamal go after another detainee, he decides that he can only save his son from his fanaticism by grabbing a gun from a guard and shooting Kamal. Boualem feels both relief and tragic pain, and then he wakes up from the dream. The boy’s final words: “Our life has been nothing but a gaping wound swarming with the maggots of delusion.” Psychologically, the trap is also closing.
Yet, he tries to recover some equanimity when he turns to memory and photographs to recover his past, but there aren’t enough memories or photographs to compensate for the barren present, and his memories become tainted. Boualem remembers when men and women could talk to each other on the street, uncovered, and not suffer from shame or fear. He can’t help reflect on the present, though, when women have been made in shadows and become the core of the culture of shame, the scapegoat, that grounds fanatical faith. Boualem’s memory of his daughter as a sweet, compassionate child links with her later denunciation of him and his love of philosophy. There is no escape.
An anonymous letter (unstamped, no addresses) warns him of his behavior and to amend it to use his intelligence and remaining time on earth to support a higher morality. Boualem takes the letter as a good sign. It is not a death threat, but the phone call in the middle of the night is. In the morning on the way to the bookstore, he hears the children who stalk him–and have thrown stones at him–say. “On the day of the Last Judgment, He will have heathens grow donkey’s ears.” Finally, the bookstore is closed by the local Community of Faith. Boualem is separated from his books. He is on the one had relieved that the ax has fallen, but the separation from his books is more difficult than the one from his family. He thinks about his adolescence, playing soccer and showing off for girls: all the energy of play and sexuality. He mourns that now children put all that energy into purity, faith, and punishing those who are not pure of faithful enough. Books had been a way for him to escape from a horrific reality, but now he doesn’t have them anymore.
When the end comes, Djaout does not land the final blow. In the last chapter. Boualem sits on a public bench overlooking the city as it slopes down to the sea. He remembers his childhood and youth, when the city was sensual and rational, human. Now the city has changed. The bearded militias do not fit the sensuality of a coastal city, and everyone is serious and pious and repressed. On public transportation, there is no longer any human warmth, a stray touch; there is no culture, no music, no singing. Everyone is certain but not Boualem, and he misses that questioning and doubt. In the emptiness of the city, Boualem imagines ghosts rather than real people, myth and poetry rather than the ugliness of faith. He feels that his childhood is betrayed. He know he could put on blinders but doesn’t. As he sits there, he figures that his books have been burned, but he wonders if there will be another spring.
Tahar Djaout doesn’t have Boualem Decker arrested, beaten, tried, convicted, and murdered, as I expected given the arc of the story. He does not close the trap, but leaves some thread of hope, more hope than Djaout himself experienced as he was shot outside his home in 1993.