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WINNER of the French Voices Grand Prize, Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and Grand Prix du Roman Métis Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's searing and thought-provoking debut novel,Brotherhood takes place in the imaginary town of Kalep, where a fundamentalist Islamist government has spread its brutal authority. Under the regime of the so-called Brotherhood, two young people are publicly executed for having loved each other. In response, their mothers begin a secret correspondence, their only outlet for the grief they share and each woman's personal reckoning with a leadership that would take her beloved child's life. At the same time, spurred on by their indignation at what seems to be an escalation of The Brotherhood's brutality, a band of intellectuals and free-thinkers seeks to awaken the conscience of the cowed populace and foment rebellion by publishing an underground newspaper. While they grapple with the implications of what they have done, the regime's brutal leader begins a personal crusade to find the responsible parties, and bring them to his own sense of justice. In this brilliant analysis of tyranny and brutality, Mbougar Sarr explores the ways in which resistance and heroism can often give way to cowardice, all while giving voice to the moral ambiguities and personal struggles involved in each of his characters' search to impose the values they hold most dear.… (more)
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That's the
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has a very distinctive way of introducing his characters - while most writers will immediately tell you if you had already met the spouse or the brother of a newly introduced character, he tells you the story as if they are unrelated until the relationship either becomes important for the story or they just end up in the same place and not spelling/showing it becomes hard. I don't think it is an attempt at secrecy - it is more of a "that could have happened to anyone, not just to the doctor's wife" kind of thing.
The story opens with an execution - a young couple is killed for daring to fall in love (and follow up on their love). That makes the circle of friends decide to publish their journal (and gives us one part of the narration). That also makes the two mothers who lost their children start sending each other letters - some of them very private, some of them discussing what they see in their towns (which often ties to the other narrative). Sarr adds yet another voice - the voice of the commander of the Islamist troops Abdel Karim Konaté (it is unclear if the name is randomly chosen - there is a Malian politician by that name who was in the government around that time). And then there are the inhabitants of Kalep - we meet quite a lot of them, and sometimes it takes awhile to find out who connects to whom and how. But the connections are there - even where you least expect - and by the end of the novel, it becomes obvious that there is no "we" and "them" - everyone is connected in one way or another. And yet, there is evil and there is good.
It is a brutal novel - that initial execution feels almost like an appetizer as the novel continues. The scariest part is that it can happen - there is nothing in it that is impossible. And I cannot even imagine how much more urgent and possible it sounded in 2015 when it was published, with ISIS at the height of their power a continent away.