For Attack the earth and the sun, Frenchman Mathieu Belezi, born in 1953, once again explores the colonial illusion in Algeria. He takes us this time to the 1840s. Through the voice of a Frenchwoman who came to settle there, struggling day after day against the harsh reality of her new life in the “agricultural colonies”, far from the beautiful promises of the government of the Republic in which she believed, and that of a soldier who finds it difficult to believe in the merits of his presence in this territory of North Africa conquered by France. On the one hand, a “band of ragged people” desperately trying to plow rock and survive cholera in a “paradise” that doesn’t exist. On the other, French soldiers who are “no angels”, looting, raping and massacring on orders. On all sides reign barbarism and misfortune – especially from the point of view of the Algerians, who suffer the raids. An incandescent novel of tragic beauty.
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