Found this book very difficult to read. Stories of the present and of the past are mixed together, and in the second part, voices of different women are added. I'm very interested in Algerian history and in women writers, but for some reason I can't exactly pinpoint what made me feel a bit bored by this book.
Memories are put into words, but they lack feelings. The characters miss something to make them come to life, seem realistic... ( )

Assia Djebar's 'Fantasia' is a historical novel but not your usual kind of historical novel. It reminds in a way of Eduardo Galeano's 'Memory of Fire' trilogy on South American history--a kind of Howard Zinn alternative history written with novelistic effects. It also reminds of Curzio Malaparte's 'Kaputt'--giving voice to the victims of a holocaust. In some respect it's more than that--Djebar not only means to address the negative effects of colonization by the supplanting of one culture and language to the diminishment of another root culture and language but also the subordination of a woman's place within either the dominant but foreign or the genuine but dominated cultures. She does this by alternating chapters describing French military operations circa 1830 and afterwards with snapshots of her own personal history set in present time (the book was originally published in 1985). More or less this is how the first two of three sections work comprising about half the book. The third section which takes up the second half at least for me lets up a little on momentum. I have to say that Fantasia was heading for 5* territory until then. In this section mostly nameless women voices describe military actions such as mentioned above but on a more personal level. One could say that Djebar drives her message home here with even more force however for me it gets a little redundant.

The language especially in the first half of Fantasia is so rich and vibrant that one can't help but marvel at the talent and technique of Djebar. Stories about the conquest of a country always have something particularly unique about them but the history of mankind is a history of conquest, a history of subjugation, a history of theft and murder, a history of the legal veneer put on afterwards to hide the shameless from their crimes and make heroes out of these same perpetrators--that is a history that is unchanging and not unique as well as the right of entitlement of the descendents of those same perpetrators who for the most part concern themselves not one whit with looking at the past objectively. This is why I admire works of this sort--because Fantasia does precisely examine all of that. It's not that the past can be turned back to the way it once was but that there is much more that we can and should learn from it. Anyway--it's an excellent book which borders on greatness and it gets a strong recommendation from this reader. ( )

Assia Djebar wants you to write a term paper about her book. She wants you to deploy trendy crit theory terminology to unpack her overtly symbolic and extremely self-aware meta-narrative of historical readings, elided autobiography and tiresome, italicized hinge pieces. But she also wants you to learn about Algerian history, about life as an Arab woman and about the torturous process of forging an identity in the liminal space between a conquering and a conquered nation. Unfortunately, she has little faith in her readers and frequently interprets her own book to be sure that everyone understands how fractured she is, what “the other” has done, on how many levels the metaphor of being veiled can operate, or what a compromise it entails that she is writing in French.

When Djebar gives voice to the Algerian women who aided the native resistance or when she frames the observations of victorious Frenchmen, she shares memorable and moving stories. Her offering of Algeria’s history is absorbable and relevant, knit from carefully chosen details that contrast each other quite appropriately (for instance, the Frenchman observing the battle at an aesthetic remove, perving out at the spectacle and the Frenchman drily tallying the dead stand in pointed opposition to the women who report how often “France” burnt down their homes and destroyed the men of their community). Some of these retellings are gripping and devastating because when Djebar restrains her anger and allows history to speak for itself, the book sails.

I was considerably less interested in her autobiographical chapters, in the precocious observations of the privileged young child who escapes the veil through reading and scholarship. Similarly, the portion of the novel that shows a young Djebar being deflowered in Paris amongst great inward drama and traditional lament verges on melodrama and isn’t strong enough to stand up to the real tragedies in the book.

At one point, Djebar writes, “When writing, I have but one concern: that I should say enough, or rather that I should express myself clearly enough. Rejecting all lyricism, turning my back on high-flown language; every metaphor seems a wretched ruse, an approximation and a weakness.” Aside from the fact that those sentences contain numerous metaphors, Djebar is simply lying. How can she square that sentiment with, “To attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to the vivisector’s scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh flakes off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood.” Or, “every language is a dark depository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage, but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, I find they are the flowers of death—chrysanthemums on tombs!”

When Djebar works to “resurrect so many of (her) vanished sisters,” her book is unique and engaging; when she pulls back to be her own theorist and when she spotlights tiny moments of her personal development on the world historical scale of her novel, she weakens her project on the whole. ( )

A marvellous book that see-saws between modern-day Algeria and the French colonial takeover. In her introduction, Dorothy Blair, the translator, describes the novel as "an historical pageant, a dialectic between written (French) and oral (Arabic) personal accounts, an inquiry into the nature of the Algerian identity, and a personal quest." ( )