The Wound

"Where is your wound?" asks Jean Genet in the lines Laurent Mauvignier uses as an epigraph to The Wound. By the time we have finished this four-part novel, we realize that for many the wound lies four decades back in "the Events" that people have tried to not talk about ever since: the Algerian War. Chronicling the lives of two cousins--Bernard and Rabut--both in the present and at the time of the Algerian War of Independence in the 1960s, we get a full picture of the lasting effects this event had on the men who were involved. Through the fragments of their stories we see the whole history of the war: its atrocities, its horrors, and its hatreds. Mauvignier shows readers how the Algerian War, always present yet always repressed, has sickened the emotional and moral life of everyone it touched--and France itself, perhaps. The epigraph, like the novel, suggests that wounded men may even become the wound itself.