FICTION

LALLIA (LE COWBOY) by Djanet Lachmet; translated by Judith Still (Carcanet: $15.95; 150 pp.). Boris Pasternak wrote somewhere of history that “one does not see it, any more than one sees the grass grow.” What this first novel by a young Algerian woman does best is show the gradual--imperceptible at first--intrusion of history (here a bloody fratricidal war) into the daily life of a young girl, and through her of a whole nation. This Maghrebian version of “Romeo and Juliet” also demonstrates the impossibility for Lallia and her French boyfriend to maintain a separate peace in the midst of the colonial conflict. In the end, out of the strife between the Arabs and the French, who had been to that point living in symbiosis, a nation is born, dignified but shattered. Likewise from the loss of her “cowboy,” the death of her father, and too fast a journey from children’s games and fairy tales to political engagement, Lallia emerges an adult but crazed with sorrow and lost between two worlds.

The beginning of the novel is fairly conventional (school days, teen-age romance, generation gap) but gives us an insight into the life of a small Algerian town in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. However, as it progresses, the story is elevated by the grimness of the war and the sobriety of the narrative to a classical quality reminiscent of Gillo Pontocorvo’s film, “The Battle of Algiers.” A promising debut.