Courage always comes from Nestor, narrator of «Heart of Almond» (Sellerio), the beautiful novel by the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, pseudonym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, who has lived in France for some time, since in an Algeria that has seen the affirmation of the Islamic Front and the repression of the 80s and 90s, the denouncing themes of his books were subject to censorship. A choice, that of taking on a female pseudonym, the name of his wife, consistent with the defense of rights against abuse and fanaticism, prejudice and fundamentalism. And if the Nafa of «What do wolves dream about?» (Sellerio), from a twenty-year-old full of hope he transforms, in the face of social injustices, into a radicalized murderer, Nestor, like Yacine from «The Virtuosi» (also Sellerio, presented by the author at Taobuk 2025), maintains the purity of heart that allows him to overcome betrayals and losses and above all to keep his dreams.
Nestor is 31 years old and a dwarf, this is how he presents himself without euphemisms, he lives in Montmartre with his grandmother Bernadette, an elderly former literature teacher who looked after him after his mother rejected that “monster”. He has just been fired from his job as a clerk in a shoe shop, and he understands that his grandmother suffers from dementia, but he does not submit to the desperation “almond heart”, as his Maghrebi friends from the nearby multi-ethnic neighborhood of Barbès call it, referring to the Kalb el Louz, a traditional Algerian sweet which in the story takes on a strong symbolic value. As strong as the friendship, love or imagination that nourished Nestor, and which despite his “diversity” (you are always different from someone else…) never made him feel inadequate or “inappropriate”, indeed they gave him the strength to invent his life every day.
It has the narrative pace of a fairy tale “Heart of Almond”, with the path taken by Nestor, flâneur in Montmartre and Barbés with the sounds of a reality teeming with crossroads, and in a summer Provence “with intoxicating charm”, where he goes to visit his fragile friend Léon. «Two imperfections that join together» says Nestor, who gives his friend his guiding thought: «To be protagonists of your own story and not an extra to be cut during the editing phase, there is only one recipe, the “crucialization” of oneself, convincing oneself that one is crucial, essential in every circumstance to sweep away the image that identified you with your wounds and your anguish». Dreaming of being a giant even if you were born a dwarf, becoming the writer you always wanted to be: just believe it.
