A Novel Returns to the Rue d'Isly Shooting of 1962
In "Halte au feu," part of this year's rentrée littéraire, Stéphane Giusti revisits the March 26, 1962 shooting in Algiers, in which the French army killed forty-nine people during a demonstration by pieds-noirs opposed to Algerian independence.
The novel, reviewed by En attendant Nadeau, is described as a "roman-mémoire" — part novel, part memoir — built around the events of that single day in Algiers, when a crowd of pieds-noirs protesting against independence was fired on by the army, leaving forty-nine dead.
According to En attendant Nadeau, the book is "particulièrement émouvant," a rare fictional treatment of an episode of the Algerian War that remains a fraught point of memory in France. The review offers no further detail on structure, characters, or publisher, and the desk has not read the book itself.
"Halte au feu" appears among this year's rentrée littéraire titles, the yearly wave of new French fiction released each autumn, in which historical reckonings with the Algerian War continue to find a place, decades after the events they describe.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
