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An Ugly Truth? Le village de l’Allemand ou le journal des Frères Schiller [The German Man’s Village or the Diary of the Schiller Brothers] a novel by Boualem Sansal. Paris: Gallimard 2008, 264pp.* Reviewed by Michelle Mazel

December 6, 2008 | Michelle Mazel

"When I see what the Islamists are doing where we live and elsewhere, I tell myself they will do worse than the Nazis if they take over one day," says Malrich, one of the book's two main protagonists, a young Muslim born in Algiers who lives in a dreary Paris suburb. (222) A suburb he says is becoming more and more like a concentration camp ruled by its two leaders he calls the Emir and the Imam. (257) The author of these inflammatory statements, the man who puts these words in the mouth of his young hero, is a Muslim himself, a man born and bred in Algiers.