The Obstinate Snail - Tapa blanda

Fiction. Translated from the French by Leon Stephen. THE OBSTINATE SNAIL is the first translation into English of Boudjedra's diabolical satire of the bureaucratic mind, L'escargot entêté. Here are the notes of a civil servant in North Africa dedicated to ridding his fair city of a thriving population of rats, yet menaced by a solitary snail. Obsession, sexual repression and megalomania drive him on. Translator Leon Stephens provides a brief survey of Boudjedra's life and work at the end of the volume.

Rachid Boudjedra is a veteran of Algeria's war of independence, the author of successful screenplays and probably the most famous writer of his country. He is the author of The Repudiation and The Barbary Figs, both in English. The first won international renown for its attack on the religious oppression of Muslim society; Algeria banned the novel for eleven years, the Islamic Salvation Front pronounced a fatwa against its author and France awarded it the Prix des enfants terribles. He writes in French and Arabic, and lives alternately in Paris and Algiers.