“No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy- that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analyzed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Salim Bachi. A fantasist from Albert Camus' land.

Being conscious of the insufficiency of my readings, the discovery lately of the Algeria-born Salim Bachi who writes in French reminds of the vast literary treasures, especially in foreign languages, (for various reasons imperceptible to English literary scene) which await to be unearthed and explored.
If it was the mention in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed that I came to read Patrick Chamoiseau, I stumbled upon Salim Bachi while browsing at a bookshop in the city during a modest Sunday evening outing with family yesterday. (Besides Bachi I bought Eduardo Berti’s Agua. Berti is an Argentine writer and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing).

Salim Bachi is the author of The Silence of Mohammed and Dog of Ulysses. But the novel of his that was available in the outlet was The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (Translated by Sue Rose/ Pushkin Press). Halfway through the work, I'm convinced he's one of those authors not to be missed at any cost.
In Sinbad he resurrects Sinbad, the fictional sailor, to narrate the experience of waves of North African immigration into Europe.

Here're a couple of excerpts from the work:

”Our world illuminated by Nothing, was a Cave whose walls showed terrible images that had men mimicking actions they didn’t understand, while governed by urges they concealed under the guise of reason…”

“Had he fallen asleep yesterday after Ben M’Hidi (a prominent leader during the Algerian war of independence) had been arrested, or the day before yesterday after Emir Abdelkader (Algerian religious and military leader) had been captured?Had he gone into exile in Damascus to spend the rest of his days with the wise old man,amid prayers in Umayyad mosque (one of the largest and oldest mosque in the world)? Perhaps he had died in Bolivia, trapped in the jungle, abandoned on the revolutionary path? (Che Guevara?) Or, going back even earlier, was he washing Jugurtha’s (King of Numidia, Algeria) feet, kissing Jesus’s feet, accompanying the Prophet on his hegira? He might be Jewish, Roman or Berber; he might have walked with the Arabs alongside their caravans; crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship; perished in the silver mines of Mexico…One question, though, kept pestering him like a persistent mosquito: why had he woken up here? And where had the six other sleepers gone?”