A Narrative Drowning in its River

The head of the jury, Tunisian critic Mohamed El-Kadi, described the novel as a captivating journey that moves against the current of history. As for Yasser Suleiman, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the prize, he saw that it adopts the form of a detective novel to make it a tool with which Khatibi probes modern Algerian history through two successive generations, praising its delicate sensitivity in which personal concerns coexist with collective ones, its language that oscillates between the colloquial and the literary, and its characters in whom cruelty meets fragility. This is not the first time Khatibi has stood on a major awards podium; in 2017, his novel "Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle" won the Katara Prize, and his novel "Sarajevo Wood" (2018) reached the shortlist for the same prize in 2020.

When I opened the pages of the novel for the first time, I felt an overwhelming urge to close it and leave it; a heavy feeling of slow pacing, repetitive scenes, and fragile characters inhabited me. The novel seemed devoid of the elements that attract a reader to its world, but I persevered and finished it to the end, and my initial feeling remained with me, which made me reflect on the relativity of aesthetic taste and how what I see as a flaw, others might see as beauty and find appealing. From this standpoint, I do not deny the Arabic Booker its merit, nor do I question the integrity of its juries, as the crowning is subject to precise competitive criteria and comparisons between the nominated works; however, I hold onto my right to critique the text stripped of the prize's shadows.

Even if it deserves the award, the text remains subject to rigorous artistic scrutiny; the narrative suffered from a piling up of events and an accumulation of facts without semantic intensification to give the plot lightness and merit, appearing overwhelmed under the weight of the burden to create a commensurate narrative investment. On the level of language, the author chose to adapt the Algerian dialect in many junctures; an artistic choice that, while giving the setting its authenticity and warmth, built a fortified exclusionary wall between the text and its readers in the Levant and other Arab regions, placing us before a strange paradox in a work that won a prize of the magnitude of the "Booker," which is supposed to broaden the horizons of reception, not close its doors.

Negative Digression and Plot Fragmentation

This initial hesitation was merely a reflection of a deeper structural flaw that accompanied the text in many places; the novel seemed governed by an obsession with "comprehensive display" more than its alignment with "artistic intensification."

This is evident in the tracking of scenes and side details that, in many cases, do not add anything new to the development of the plot or push it toward a qualitative shift. The narrative line the author opens regarding the father's accusation of collaboration with colonialism, and the story of the profiteers among the resistance comrades, returns in more than one place through different voices and characters without gaining a dramatic addition that justifies this repetition. Thus, the event does not develop as much as it is recycled from multiple angles, so the volume of the story expands while its dramatic return remains limited.

This excess extends to the description of places; in the Bou Saada passages, the narrative is not content with giving the city a presence that defines the geographical and social scope of the events. The expansion in evoking its details is such that the city almost turns into an independent subject that monopolizes the narrator's attention. Description in itself is not superfluous when it contributes to building the place or intensifying its significance, but the problem arises when the description exceeds its suggestive function to become an end in itself. The place then takes precedence over the event, and the reader is faced with an accumulation of information rather than an artistic utilization of the place within the story.

The same can be observed in the scenes of the brothels, as these scenes are given a wide narrative space relative to their actual impact on the narrative trajectory. They do not, in all their instances, form decisive shifts in the fates of the characters, nor are their details invested enough to cause a shift in the conflict, which makes their presence closer to recording a side of social reality than to a necessity imposed by the novel's structure. Hence, the question is not: should they have been deleted? As much as it becomes: did they really need all this space to perform their function?

This tendency toward elaboration reaches a clearer degree in the narrator's recollection of the history of her friendship with Salwa Adili since their school years; the narrative stops at successive details of the relationship, starting from stealing the father's money to secretly buy a bra, extending to comparisons of the body and jealousy over the details of the friend's skin and mole, reaching the intimate touches in childhood and the desire of each to be the other's sister. This recollection consumes pages in building a relationship that could have had an important impact on shaping the narrator's character, but the space allocated to it seems greater than its direct need within the narrative path. Its most prominent function in the narrative present, connected to the fact that Salwa has become the narrator's sister-in-law and her gynecologist who followed her examinations before marriage and during pregnancy, could have been hinted at or a large part of its introductions reduced without the relationship losing its essential meaning.

Here precisely, the matter goes beyond mere "excess of details" to a question related to narrative economy; a detail does not gain its value from its mere presence, its true value is in its ability to produce meaning, change a character, or push the event forward. When details accumulate without the character's situation changing or the conflict advancing, the narrative turns from construction to piling up and from revelation to display, which makes some passages seem as if they want to keep everything the character knows about their past instead of choosing from this past what the reader needs to understand their present.

The paradox is that while the novel lays out this amount of detail about side events and distant memories, it does not give some of the moments most capable of psychological and dramatic tension the same depth. The body that is violated against its will under the cover of custom, the cornea that is implanted from a corpse, and the father who is summoned to be held accountable for a past he fought for; all are moments that carry high potential for revealing fear, shame, guilt, memory, and the body, but they do not always invest these potentials with the depth suggested by their weight within the narrative experience. Here a striking paradox arises: the text lingers before details that could be reduced, but sometimes passes quickly before moments that could have been deepened.

Consequently, the problem of the novel does not return to the abundance of narrative material, but to the absence of sufficient distinction between what needs to be told, what is enough to be hinted at, and what deserves to be given longer narrative time because it carries within it a psychological shift. When a marginal detail is equal to a pivotal moment in the amount of narrative attention, intensification loses its function, and the text in some places becomes closer to exhausting memory with all the minutiae it stores.

Distortion of Narrative Time: Acceleration vs. Semantic Slowness

The temporal problem in the novel "I Struggle Against the River's Current" does not lie in the narrative's transition between the present and the past, as the overlap between times is an intentional structural choice, and flashback performs an essential function in revealing the personal and historical backgrounds that shaped the characters' fates. The observation here relates to the way the narrative space is distributed between these times; the space the narrative gives to some events does not always correspond to their weight in the narrative structure, so some moments of dramatic importance are reduced while the space for other details and time periods that could have been presented with greater intensification expands.

This appears from the line with which the novel opens, represented by the killing of Makhlouf and the resulting accusation of Akila and her interrogation. The event carries clear elements for directing the movement of the story; it raises a central question and opens the door to anticipation and revelation. However, the narrative does not maintain this focus for long; it soon opens up to previous times that extend to distant decades, so the current moment retreats before the extension of memory, and the event that was supposed to push the story forward turns into a mere crossing point toward more extensive past stories. This does not mean that the flashback itself is unjustified, as it is indeed justified, but its density makes the present less capable of maintaining its centrality that the opening of the novel gave it.

Conversely, the novel gives Azouz's past a wide narrative space, following his life from his childhood and his move from the village, through the Second World War and the War of Liberation and his relationship with the Harkis, up to the accusation of treason that befell him. The importance of this material lies in that it gives the character a history that explains his positions and fates, but this extension sometimes exceeds the function of background to build a parallel story with its own details and paths. With the expansion of this story, the resumption of the path related to the present is delayed, so the past becomes more present than being just a key to explaining the character.

The same observation appears differently in the flashbacks related to Akila and her relationship with Salwa Adili; the narrative does not merely provide intensive references to the past, but tracks successive stages of her childhood and adolescence, leading up to her marriage. These details help shape the character and reveal some of her motivations and relationships, but their temporal extension does not seem equally necessary; some stages could be condensed without the character losing her essential features or function in the story. Here, the problem relates to the quantity of detail granted to the past rather than the principle of the flashback itself.

It is important here to distinguish between this observation and digression. Digression relates to the narrative veering into details that can be dispensed with or reduced without a fundamental impact on the story's trajectory. The temporal observation, however, relates to the ratio of narrative space to duration and importance; a short event covering a limited time may occupy a narrow space, while years of a character's life are granted a vast amount of narrative. Therefore, the issue here is not about deleting flashbacks. The issue is the amount each flashback needs to fulfill its function without turning into a path that crowds out the event from which the novel originally started.

Thus, the multiplicity of times in the novel does not represent a flaw in itself; its value depends on how the transition between them is managed and on how much each flashback adds to the present. When some flashbacks expand to the point where the past story becomes more detailed than the moment it was meant to explain, the effectiveness of the current event recedes, and the direct link between the flashback and the path the novel originally began weakens.

Consequently, there is a need for greater condensation in some places, and for granting central moments a space befitting their ability to produce tension and revelation.

Stylistic oscillation between Modern Standard Arabic and the local dialect

The linguistic discourse in "Aghalib Majra al-Nahr" oscillates between the standard Arabic of the narrative and the dialect of the characters, a movement that derives its legitimacy from the nature of the Algerian environment and the text's desire to give its characters voices that belong to their social space. However, this interplay does not always maintain its artistic balance; highly specific local vocabulary and structures infiltrate some passages, making the language less accessible to a reader unfamiliar with the Algerian dialect, especially when the context does not explain or suggest their meaning. This appears in the expression "Nas El Ghiwan" (p. 38), and the phrase: "Taghu 'ala al-nas bil-'ujub wa samaya 'amra al-yawm" (p. 143), alongside "Shahlat al-khamila" on the same page, and "Al-sabula 'atshana" (p. 148). Thus, dialectal specificity turns from a tool for building a character's voice into a partial obstacle to the flow of reading, because the reader finds themselves occupied with decoding the term as much as they are with the meaning the scene carries.

Added to this is the inclusion of some obscene and explicit terms in parts of the text, a presence that does not seem in all places linked to an artistic necessity that transcends the realism of daily language. The realism of dialogue does not necessarily require conveying every term verbatim, especially when the term does not play a clear role in revealing the character or deepening the situation. In some places, it would have been possible to suffice with a less direct expression while maintaining the significance of the scene, achieving a greater degree of linguistic economy without the dialogue losing its sincerity or realistic character.

Thus, the observation is not merely about the use of dialect or daily language; it is about the artistic function it performs within the text. When dialect contributes to constructing a character's identity and highlighting their belonging, it becomes an aesthetic component of the narrative. However, when local or direct vocabulary proliferates without its presence being matched by an effect in building the character, advancing the event, or deepening the meaning, it weighs down the linguistic fabric and limits the smoothness of reception. Consequently, there appears to be a need for a degree of selection that balances the fidelity of the local voice with the economy of expression, so that the language remains part of the novel's structure, not an added burden on its path.

I finished "Aghalib Majra al-Nahr" with the same impression I started with. I do not challenge the award, for prize committees see what I do not see, and taste varies from one reader to another. However, my work as a critic is to hold the text accountable for what was placed before me, and I was presented with material that deserved better treatment than it received.

A cornea transplanted from a corpse into a blind eye, a father being interrogated today about a distant past, and behind them a war of liberation whose files are still open. Any one of these threads would have sufficed for a complete work. However, the narrative spent its credit on side scenes and let the present from which the story started recede before an expanding past. Then the language came and obscured some of the meaning from a reader who does not know the dialect, and was lenient with terms that the situation did not always require.

What stuck in my mind, in the end, was not the novel, but the idea upon which it was based: a past being summoned to be held accountable. As for the novel itself, it remained at a distance from me.

Hence the title of this reading: "A Narrative Drowning in its River".. a wide river of stories, times, and voices, whose current was too strong for its banks to contain, so it swallowed the story that originally carried it.