Silence is death : the life and work of Tahar Djaout /

Sukys (visiting scholar, McGill Univ.) has written a beautiful but unsentimental book about her search for Algerian poet Tahar Djaout, who was killed in 1993 at the height of Islamic terrorism against intellectuals. No work of dreary lit crit, this is creative nonfiction at its best. Beginning and ending in the Iowa city of Elkader (which was named after a young Algerian hero), the book reveals Djaout's extraordinary eloquence on every page, but it is framed as a detective novel: What connects a 19th-century Algerian hero with this midwestern town? What connects this European woman with a 20th-century Algerian man? Sukys strikes up an extraordinary "dialogue of the dead" with Djaout. She addresses him directly, telling him what she has discovered about him, and their lives become intertwined as she untangles and interprets the puzzle of his novels and poems. Though she has been warned of the danger of travel to Algeria, Sukys goes there. (Or does she? Did she invent the desert and Algiers that she describes at such loving length?) Finally, she conducts a posthumous interview with Djaout, who said "Silence is death" and who paid with his life for demanding intellectual freedom, honesty, and tolerance. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates; general readers. M. Cooke Duke University