The opening0% in

Lakhdar

Bône (the worksite)

The opening

On a building site in Bône, Lakhdar and Mourad work as day-labourers under the contempt of the colonial foreman, until Lakhdar strikes him and is thrown in jail. The book begins in the grinding everyday of colonial labour, the humiliation and the first act of revolt out of which its wider story of Algeria unfolds.

The opening

explicitThe novel opens on the colonial worksites of Bône, the real port city of eastern Algeria now called Annaba, where Lakhdar and Mourad labour under a French foreman; sited in Bône.

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The city25% in

Rachid

Constantine

The city

In Constantine, the ancient city clinging to its ravine and bridges, the men's obsession with Nedjma draws them back again and again to her walls. Kateb makes the vertiginous, divided city, half in the air over its gorge, a fitting emblem of the split colonial world and of the woman none of them can reach.

The Constantine chapters

explicitConstantine, the real city built above deep gorges in eastern Algeria, is Nedjma's city and a centre of the novel's wandering; sited at the historic city.

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The tribe50% in

Rachid

The Keblout lands

The tribe

Behind the four men stands the broken tribe of Keblout, their common ancestor, and the ancestral lands the French conquest scattered. In the long recollected history of the tribe, Rachid above all, Kateb roots the fragmented present in a deeper Algerian past, a lineage of dispossession the novel circles back through again and again.

The tribal chapters

inspired byThe ancestral country of the Keblout tribe, from which all four men descend, is drawn from the tribal lands of eastern Algeria and sited in the countryside between Constantine and Bône.

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The unrest75% in

Mourad

The colonial reckoning

The unrest

Around the men the colonial order tightens, strikes and arrests, the shadow of the 1945 massacres, the beatings and prisons that radicalise a generation. Written on the eve of the Algerian war, the novel carries the charge of a nation about to rise, the private obsession with Nedjma bound up with the public one of liberation.

The unrest chapters

explicitThe strikes, arrests and colonial violence around the eastern towns reflect the real unrest of 1940s Algeria that fed the coming war of independence; sited among the worksites of Bône.

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The myth100% in

Nedjma

Nedjma (the star)

The myth

Nedjma, born of a French mother and an Algerian father, beautiful and out of reach, is less a woman the men can win than the image of Algeria itself, contested, divided, longed for. In her the four cousins' desire and the country's destiny become the same thing, and the book's circling, unresolved form is the shape of that impossible yearning.

Throughout

inspired byNedjma herself, the woman all four love and none possesses, is the novel's central symbol rather than a fixed place; sited at Constantine, the city most bound to her.

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