![]() The women of the town raise the curtains of their homes “onto the courtyard and fountains they quietly watch the spectacle the guard had announced was about to begin ” (1). Our eyes move at the pace of the character’s accounts. From the start the story beckons the reader to enter the town of Blida. ![]() ![]() Zimra writes that Children of the New World has a “tightly Aristotelian structure (unity of time, place and plot and engages social canvas” (212). Djebar, however, does not resort to such an “alienation effect of the non-Aristotelian kind”. German playwright Bertold Brecht used a technique in (theater) acting in which “the spectator is prevented from feeling his way into the characters” (Brecht and Bentley 130). The kind of exposition Ghazoul speaks of is, however, not of a Brechtian kind. Every detail counts because the changes are momentous and, as the title states, part of a new world. With this in mind, we delve into life in Blida - a small town in Algeria that is being swept by the fast changes in the former French possession of Algeria and where deeper themes are subtly fleshed out in the daily lives of the characters. The cinematic exposition allows the reader to contextualize the characters.(122) Djebar’s prose zooms in on a scene like a camera from above. The novel opens with a bird’s eye view of the small town. ![]() ![]() The brilliance of the novel lies not in its theme, but in its style and structure. In her review of the work for Journal of Middle East Women's Studies in 2007, Ferial J. ![]()
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