The characters sometimes feel like mere vehicles for Khadra’s messaging about disaffected youth. Nevertheless, the novel does illuminate Khalil’s travails with plenty of empathy. As a result, his misguided motivations define a believable if not entirely relatable figure.
The rest of the novel is just as direct and irresistible as this first line — every subsequent sentence, in this translation by John Cullen, is carefully designed to draw you in and lead you into the next one ... Khadra does a great job of guiding us through the stages of Khalil’s radicalization. Xenophobia, Islamophobia, poverty, family dysfunction: All of the usual triggers are examined, but the author goes further, to show that radicalization is not inevitable. Often it is a matter of choice, a way to embrace bitterness and anger over adaptation and personal accountability ... in this novel full of plot twists, the author saves his biggest shock for the end ... This novel is both timely and, sadly, timeless. In examining the anatomy of radicalism, Khadra shows that all forms of extremism, whether political, religious or otherwise, stem from the same source: a refusal to see things from an opposing point of view. For Khalil and many others who feel called to commit atrocities in the name of a higher cause, the outcome is only tragedy.
Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s latest novel explores European home-ground terrorism in a gripping psychological first-person novel. We follow Khalil’s dumbfounded journey back to his native Belgium, grappling with the circumstances surrounding his vest’s malfunctioning ... Khadra sketches the outline of a perfect candidate to radical Islam ... Khadra’s strength lies in weaving real and fictional events with Khalil’s inner conflicts to keep us guessing where truth ends and fiction takes off. The terrorist attacks which killed over 130 people in Paris and the French national stadium in November 2015 happened— Khadra himself now lives in Paris. The Brussels metro attack happened. The reader is taken on a hyperrealist deep-dive in the complex, intrinsically contradictory and disturbed jihadi mind. Khalil resonates well with the author’s chosen themes of exploring tensions between Occident and Orient in a post-colonial world, identity and tipping points, following the pulse of current political events ... another fast-paced, thought-provoking and immersive story within a ravishing novel.
Although described as a thriller, the story moves along inexorably at its own pace toward Khalil’s desired conclusion. Now he has the opportunity to strike back at the Moroccan upper crust who have targeted his brotherhood, and to die gloriously in the service of his God. The ending has a twist, but it doesn’t really feel right ... There is much to like about this novel. It’s well worth reading for the fluent writing and the strong, memorable characters alone. While we can’t like Khalil, or even sympathize with him, we come to pity and to some extent understand him. The flaws lie in the plot where contrivances seem to address the author’s needs rather than those of the story. Perhaps Khadra’s previous acclaimed works set the bar too high for this one.
You wouldn't expect to care about a character whose life's purpose is to murder a large number of people. But Khalil, who tells his story with a mixture of punkish attitude and intellectual snobbery, is so utterly without meaningful human connection that it's hard not to feel a measure of sympathy. Khadra skillfully shows how someone like Khalil can be turned into a terrorist from a young age. With Khalil's fate—and those of countless potential victims—perpetually hanging in the balance, the book becomes a gripping existential inquiry that earns the author comparisons with Camus ... An exciting work of fiction rooted in docu-like reality.
With a narrative both intimate and broad, Khadra attempts to show the ways the disenfranchised and marginalized are seduced into violent fundamentalism, but much of this comes off as sketchy sociology ... The narrator functions as a cipher for a series of conversations about Muslim identity and racism in relation to the stigma of Islamic terrorism, which are by turns illuminating and pedantic. In the end, Khadra’s difficult story about one man’s search for meaning comes up short.
