Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us

November 23, 2020
Romance and revolution intermingle in Andras’ Prix Goncourt–winning debut, which tells the story of Fernand Iveton, a real-life pied noir who was condemned for planting a bomb in support of Algerian independence. In the late 1950s, as cries against French rule reach a fever pitch, Fernand bungles an attempt to detonate a bomb (scheduled to go off after work hours so that no one will be killed in the blast) inside the factory where he works. Fernand is captured and tortured by the authorities. Meanwhile, his Polish wife, Hélène, eludes the gendarmes. A cause célèbre, Fernand’s case attracts a flashy lawyer determined to save him from the guillotine. Interspersed between scenes of Fernand’s trial, during which he appeals to the jury as a man of conviction, is the story of his and Hélène’s courtship and their introduction to radical politics in the personage of Henri Maillot, variously considered a patriot and a traitor. Andras achieves a clear-eyed recreation of postwar Communism and the armed battle against tyranny, shot through with intense prose and insight into the characters’ inner lives. The result brings an immediacy to a fraught chapter of history.

January 1, 2021
Crime and punishment in 1950s Algeria. Fernand Iveton would never dream of harming a fellow member of the working class. Alas, in an act of sabotage gone awry, he has, though, and he's been arrested for his troubles. It's no ordinary arrest, for Fernand, though European, is a prominent figure in the movement to free Algeria from French rule. "Where's the bomb, you son of a bitch?" an interrogator shouts before punching him so hard that "his jaw makes a faint cracking sound." Worse is yet to come for him and some of his comrades. Iveton, a real figure executed in 1957, emerges in Andras' novel as a rough-edged but principled revolutionary, one who "may not have read Marx like the party leaders" but whose commitment to an independent Algeria of "Arabs, Berbers, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Maltese, French, Germans..." is very real. Fernand doesn't budge in this commitment in Andras' slender narrative, and neither does his faithful wife, a Polish immigrant he met in France. Andras' scenes move back and forth in time and space from Paris and the French countryside to Algiers--in the latter, mostly a dusty prison yard where nothing much happens even as, beyond the walls, French labor unions and leftist politicians agitate for Fernand's release. Their efforts are in vain: The verdict of guilty "falls like the blade that is now promised to him," a verdict that H�l�ne and Fernand accept with grim stoicism. As Andras writes in the afterword to his book, which won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel, the case of Iveton was once so well known that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a memorial essay about him in Les Temps modernes, and, it's said, Albert Camus tried to plead for his freedom. It is almost forgotten today, and though mostly affectless in tone, Andras' novel revives a lost moment in history, neatly bookending Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation. A promising debut of interest to students of modern French literature.

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