Attacking Earth and Sun

French writer Belezi’s scathing English-language debut depicts the early-19th-century colonization of Algeria as a Boschian tableau of arrogance and atrocity, narrated alternately by a distraught colonist and a disenchanted soldier. Séraphine is losing hope of attaining the “heaven on earth promised us by the Republic of France” while she flails on a farming settlement. Faced with an unforgiving climate, a cholera epidemic, and murderous raids by locals, she questions whether to remain in a place “blindly mapped out by a few wretched bureaucrats” and reckons with the grievous consequences of her choice to emigrate. Her sections, marked by despairing refrains (“holy Mary mother of God”) are among the novel’s most haunting indictments of the colonial enterprise. In the unnamed soldier’s narration, the prose is more overwrought as he recounts his army’s sexual assaults on Algerian villagers (“Soldiers can forget their troubles and with broad thrusts clear a path through the calcinated forests of their Bedouin bush”). Villains, too, are cartoonishly portrayed, such as the insatiable captain who proclaims, “France has been given the divine mission to pacify your barbaric lands and offer your empty brainboxes the splendors of a millennia-old culture, whether you like it or not!” For the most part, though, this mesmerizes with its righteous and often poetic anger. (Oct.)