The Last Summer of Reason
Tahar Djaout
(Ruminator Books) $19

The American artist is forever being asked to prove that art matters. She must always struggle against the assumption that art is the fancy side dish to the difficult business, the meat of economic matters. When she succeeds in defending herself, her argument is often understood only through translation into a weak rhetoric of self-help.

This is our fate. In other places, regions experienced with the more overt strains of fundamentalist or fascistic repression, art can mean blood. Such is the fate of the book The Last Summer of Reason. It comes to us from Algeria, where in 1993 its author, Tahar Djaout, was assassinated for wielding his "fearsome pen." His book, which was found among his papers after his death, tells the real story of his tragic life through a fictional account of a bookstore owner, Boualem Yekker, who is struggling to disseminate "revolt and beauty" inside a repressive fundamentalist regime.

Djaout's tenth work--his first to be published in English--is thus marked by an eerie quality. His writing is sparse; it floats, as if it must suspend itself like a dream above the awful reality of its world. It is this removal that brings the horror into relief. Djaout also makes use of the parable of paranoia's great technique: the alternation of reverie with nightmare, hard political exteriors with terror-stricken inner spaces.

It's a difficult irony, the way that repression makes a work matter. How is the liberated, safe American to read this work? Few of us know firsthand what the author of the book's foreword, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, calls "the league of darkness and intolerance in the life-and-death struggle of enlightenment and creativity." It is easy for us to pass over such a work with merely a shudder. But listen, this is not just a story about the horror of physical death, it's about spiritual death as well--the death of the ability and right to "bring doubt and change" through acts of creativity.

A closer review of our situation may remind us that fanaticism is not just a distant earthquake, but an approaching tsunami. In fact, Soyinka calls fanaticism and intolerance (under its many guises) an "overweening actuality," unambiguously the life-and-death discourse of the 21st century. In this light, The Last Summer of Reason is a parable that we'd best not ignore.