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A review by nwhyte
The African Equation by Yasmina Khadra
3.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2945262.html
It's the story of a German doctor, dismayed by his wife's suicide, who sets off on a long sail journey with a friend; they are kidnapped by pirates and he ends up, after numerous rather horrible adventures, in a refugee camp in Darfur, where eventually he is rescued; but he finds that he cannot find peace in Frankfurt, and returns to Africa.
There are a couple of whopping big problems with it that require some suspension of disbelief. The pirates who capture the narrator and his friend are surprisingly eloquent for a bunch of militia. (One of them turns out to be a published poet, but the others are not.) The path from the Gulf of Aden to Darfur is politically implausible and geographically weak - there is no mention of the River Nile, which flows firmly across any conceivable route and is rather hard to miss. While Darfur is not exactly lush, it's not as desertified as portrayed here either. The parts of the book in Frankfurt seem a bit more grounded in local knowledge.
Of course, "Khadra" (in real life Mohammed Moulessehoul, using his wife's name as a pseudonym) is Algerian, and I suspect that some of the scenes of violence and indeed of refugee camps are more closely drawn from experience and knowledge of his home country rather than places further to the east or south. And certainly I've met militia leaders with literary pretensions, and even white Frenchmen who have adopted African-ness as a new identity like the character Bruno. So if you can swallow the implausibilities it's an interesting narrative.
It's the story of a German doctor, dismayed by his wife's suicide, who sets off on a long sail journey with a friend; they are kidnapped by pirates and he ends up, after numerous rather horrible adventures, in a refugee camp in Darfur, where eventually he is rescued; but he finds that he cannot find peace in Frankfurt, and returns to Africa.
There are a couple of whopping big problems with it that require some suspension of disbelief. The pirates who capture the narrator and his friend are surprisingly eloquent for a bunch of militia. (One of them turns out to be a published poet, but the others are not.) The path from the Gulf of Aden to Darfur is politically implausible and geographically weak - there is no mention of the River Nile, which flows firmly across any conceivable route and is rather hard to miss. While Darfur is not exactly lush, it's not as desertified as portrayed here either. The parts of the book in Frankfurt seem a bit more grounded in local knowledge.
Of course, "Khadra" (in real life Mohammed Moulessehoul, using his wife's name as a pseudonym) is Algerian, and I suspect that some of the scenes of violence and indeed of refugee camps are more closely drawn from experience and knowledge of his home country rather than places further to the east or south. And certainly I've met militia leaders with literary pretensions, and even white Frenchmen who have adopted African-ness as a new identity like the character Bruno. So if you can swallow the implausibilities it's an interesting narrative.