In this way, if Infidels is a novel, it’s also an anthology of desire, a sequence of odes to need in a world which does not satisfy. They are partially interior, and so, like a soliloquy in Shakespeare, they express the unexpressed, desires that find no purchase in the world: when rendered as if they’ve been externalized, as if all the inexpressible need and desire in a human soul could be spewed out onto the open page, the story of this novel becomes the story of that impossible expression. Each monologue is a story without an ending, an appeal for kindness-for understanding-that may or may not be answered. But the form of the novel allows Taïa to do something different than just unfold the narrative of how Jalla gets from point A to point B. The monologues accumulate, and if you connect the dots, there is-as I said-a coming-of-age story that ends in jihad, a Moroccan boy named Jalla who becomes a man, living lost and isolated, in Belgium.
So what is this novel? Composed as a series of monologues, Infidels is a succession of lonely and lost voices spewing their life out into the void. This, in a way, is what this book is about: everything that such words are crafted to cover over, everything such stories can’t-and don’t and won’t-comprehend, but which, still, speaks out. To use them for this book only demonstrates how limited and limiting a word is, when set against the vast depths and extent of humanity in our bodies and minds. Words like “homosexual” or “jihad” tell us so little about this novel’s protagonist, smoothing out more complexity than they reveal they are tidy words for an untidy reality. But the risk of reading the novel in those terms is that you miss everything that makes any of this interesting.
Strictly speaking, there is a narrative of radicalization here the novel does end with suicide bombs and the main character, Jallal, does find love with another man, after a short lifetime of living a socially-repressed sexuality. But I began this novel expecting to read a homosexual coming-of-age story, one that ends with a suicide bombing. Of course, the back cover describes the novel as ending with radicalization and jihad, so I knew it wouldn’t be completely autobiographical. I thought I knew what to expect from his newly translated novel, Infidels.
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