Fire in the Unnameable Country

Heyadat is the child of an unnamed African nation, one perpetually swept by tides of change and calamity. Caught up in yet another tumultuous period, the "glossolalist" narrator spins a discursive history of his family and of La Maga, the troubled city in which the family lives. Told in Heyadat's unique idiolect, the tale focuses in particular on Heyadat's father Mamun Ben Jaloun; a young man in a land subject to the whims of the Americans and their Soviet enemies, he struggles to find his way, shifting mercurially from career to career, criminal and singer, urchin and orderly and finally a guardian in the archive of thought tapes used to monitor the very minds of La Maga's citizenry. Related in colorful neologisms and eschewing simple linear narrative structures, the work paints a vivid picture of a community victim to great forces outside any person's control, of a nation where the powerful can fall from grace at any moment and the weak must make terrible compromises to buy a morsel of security for their loved ones. While the language may prove a barrier for some, this is a debut novel that rewards effort. (Mar.) Agent: John Pearce, Westwood Creative Artists