“As long as you're alive, you have to hunt for happiness.” A Blog on the thoughts of Yasmina Khadra, contributed by Ruth O’Driscoll.

“I reinvent myself through my characters. I make friends, I create companions who are very useful to me and who help me understand.”  

Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul, who writes under the pen name Yasmina Khadra, spoke to a French-Canadian newspaper La Presse about how writing helps him find a way through the dark side of life. “This pandemic is a monstrosity. I have had a lot of grief in my family.”

“We are all going through very difficult times that seem insurmountable to us. Adem, is a bit like us in times of abandonment or denial, when we're strangers to ourselves and not trying to get up.”

In his latest novel, Le Sel de Tous les Oublis, Khadra tells the tale of a man who has hit rock-bottom. When his wife walks out on him, Adem sets out alone on a journey of discovery. A melancholy antihero, he encounters a gallery of extraordinary characters; a dwarf, a blind musician, wily veterans and simple-minded convicts.

"Lost people have always made an impression on me because I try to locate the sources of their abandonment and I only see them", Khadra told Belgian newspaper, L’Echo. "I do not see the reasons which pushed them to this slide, I only see them embodying this slide. Each of them is an open book on everything that threatens our peace of mind, our balance, our dreams."

“Everyone lives through zones of turbulence and it comes to us all to know times that darken all around us. At times like these, we do no more than listen to each other, hauntings and bitterness suffocate us. But we have to get back up. And since we can't get up alone, we need the insight of others. It is other people who allow us to find  an escape route. We are all an integral part of other people. "

“As long as you're alive, you have to hunt for happiness.”