UNP blog

Century of Locusts by Malika Mokeddem

“Mokeddem’s novel is a gem, brimming with beautifully rendered scenes . . . that remain indelible in the reader’s memory.”— Booklist

“Many of Mokeddem’s sentences have the breath of poetry upon them. . . . Indeed, a question worth asking of literature in translation is whether it does not give us an unfamiliar English with powerful new shapes and cadences—the expressive possibilities of another language reinvigorate our own. One believes this to be true of the work of Laura Rice and Karim Hamdy here, as also of Erdag Goknar’s striking translation five years ago of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. . . . Mokeddem’s locusts become a most complex symbol, bleakly suggestive not just of man’s blindness and rapacity but also of the unswerving way of fate, deaf to human pleas and intentions.”—San Francisco Chronicle