The Old Man Who Forgot

Samir Kacimi

"An old man without a name, bearing a number instead of an identity, sits in solitude, engrossed in documenting what remains of him. What he writes doesn't restore his memory but rearranges its fragments in a closed loop, where there is no straight line to truth, but an eternal circling around a lost center.

In this work, set in Algiers, Samir Kacimi weaves a tightly knit circular narrative, in which three stories unfold within one novel: the tale of a psychiatric patient chasing his lost name amidst imposed identities, and the story of the "Circle of Unknown Writers," where the protagonist faces failure in a strange ritual resembling confession. Both open the door to a third, deeper, and more dangerous narrative about a suppressed history resurrected through a haunted building, a disappeared father, and names deliberately erased from official memory, from the events of October 1988 through the Black Decade to the present.

Here, writing becomes its own subject, and the reader becomes a partner in the birth and fragility of the text. A novel that knows it is a novel, and reveals its mechanisms not for boasting, but for questioning, putting the act of narration itself into doubt.

Samir Kacimi is an Algerian novelist who has worked as a lawyer and cultural and literary editor for several Arab platforms. He has published nine novels, some of which have been translated into French, including "A Wonderful Day to Die," "Love in a Slanted Autumn," and "Folly as No One Has Told It," published by the French houses "Seuil" and "Actes Sud." His novels have been shortlisted for prestigious Arab and foreign awards such as the Arab World Literature Prize in Paris and the Marnostrum Prize. His works are studied and critically discussed in Arab, French, and German universities, and he is considered one of the prominent voices in contemporary Arabic fiction."