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MEN GOD FORGOT (Les hommes oubliés de Dieu, 1941) is a small but powerful collection of five short stories set in a squalid neighborhood of Cairo. These heart-breaking tales (averaging 20 pages each), are populated with living and breathing characters: men, women and children consigned to fate’s lowest rungs.
This book will be of interest to readers who have encountered one or more of the Albert Cossery’s later novels. In it you get to experience the novice writer flexing his muscles, deciding what modes and styles suit his temperament, testing themes, failing and succeeding. You’ll discover Cossery was from the very start a master of the psychologically astute observation. You’ll find the jaundiced air that pervades subsequent works has not yet appeared. Instead what dominates at this early stage is a passionate anger: “A hot substance penetrates, flows through life, burning it’s creatures, waking monsters in the bodies of defenseless children, looting everything in its infernal rage and bringing thirst, thirst to everything: lips, the soul, the eyes, the flesh. Ah, who will deliver men from this hell?”
He can pause to be humorous: “Hanafi continued his sleep just where he had left off, as one takes up an interrupted task.” (The pleasures of indolence if not sleep will be a recurrent theme of his work.)
Worth comparing also is the notorious misogyny of his later novels. Here there is little or none of that. In fact, the respect Cossery grants to the emotional strength and sexual integrity of Faiza, the girl in the book’s second tale (“The Girl and the Hashish-Smoker”) is quite remarkable. Cossery devotes the opening paragraphs to a description, from her perspective, of the title characters’ love-making: “The enormous Nile with its treacherous currents flowed in her. ( … ) Her joy swelled, rose as a wave rises. She was confounded with joy, became joy itself.”
It is reported Albert Camus, who was himself born into poverty in North Africa (Algeria), was favorably impressed when he read MEN GOD FORGOT soon after its initial publication. Did Camus see in it a kindred spirit, another incipient humanist? Was Camus disappointed by the direction Cossery took in his later fictions?
MEN GOD FORGOT is currently out of print. The edition I read was a 1963 paperback reprint of Harold Edwards’ translation from the French, printed in England and published by City Lights Books (the San Francisco shop of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and the Beats). New Directions and New York Review Books Classics are currently re-issuing other volumes of Cossery — most recently “The Colors of Infamy” (which I reviewed here a few weeks ago) and “Proud Beggars” (on my reading list). Here’s hoping one of those publishers sponsors a fresh edition of MEN GOD FORGOT
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