Mustapha Tlili

Tlili, Mustapha (b. 1937). Tunisian novelist and diplomat. His largely autobiographical novels, La Rage aux tripes (1975), Le Bruit dort (1978), Gloire des sables (1982), and La Montagne du lion (1988), explore the traumas of the decolonized. Although Tlili is Tunisian, his protagonists are war-scarred Algerian intellectuals, caught in the bind between their past and their present. In many respects the novels read like detective stories; they are set in the milieu of international civil servants in the context of decolonization. (Tlili himself is a veteran international civil servant at the United Nations.)

His first three novels, although different in their style and techniques of writing, have a similar story-line: a Paris-bred Algerian journalist/intellectual moves in the diplomatic world of New York and is torn between political engagement and an artistic vocation. This traumatized character is restless and unsatisfied. His only anchorage is his writing, where all his tensions and obsessions are exhibited and exhausted. Tlili's recent novel, La Montagne du lion, is the most lyrical and accomplished of his work. It is an indictment of the regimes of Independence, symbolized by the recurrent image of the megalomaniac dictator, which have, in the name of progress, subverted the traditional order of things, ‘l'ordre clair et délibéré des choses’, in this desert community.

[<auth>Hédi Abdel-Jaouad]