Tea in the Harem

Tea in the Harem, Mehdi Charef.

Gritty first novel written in 1983 about poor and unemployed Algerian immigrant youth in France.

Feels episodic, sometimes contrived or contradictory, but also authentic at its core.  Depressing, shocking in places.  Catapulted the author to fame and he was asked by Costas-Gavras (director of Z etc) to direct a film based on the novel .  Still not sure what the title means...

(Found out later... "Tea in the Harem" is a corruption of "Theorem"; the narrator's knucklehead friend misunderstands this when learning Archimedes Theorem in class.)

3.5*
(Jan 2008)