Vacation in Morocco

Wuthering Expectations is on vacation in Morocco, returning January 15 or so.  Thanks for all of the help with book recommendations.

I've turned the security setting up a notch, just temporarily.

Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Sand Child - what's Borges doing here?

Jorge Luis Borges is a writer with whom I feel very comfortable. He's had as much impact on the way I think about books as just about anyone. Don't know how much that really shows up here.

I have read a few contemporary novels that make their debt to Borges explicit. W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1999) and Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996) both used Borges as a touchstone. My understanding of Borges was an enormous help in finding a way into these challenging books. Maybe I was pointed in some narrow, or wrong directions, who knows. But I was inside the books, not just scratching my head.

Borges' presence guarantees nothing, though. Orham Pamuk's The New Life (1997) was littered with Borgesian ideas. But at the end of the book I was still baffled, lost. The Borges life raft failed me.

In Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Sand Child (1985) a Moroccan father of seven daughters demands a son. When his eighth child, another daughter, is born, he finds a solution: he declares that the child is a boy. One might think - I did - that this deception, and its various complications and implications, would be the subject of the novel, and would be sufficiently interesting. I was startled, then, to find that by page 60 of 165, our hero was not only an adult, but a widower. Now what?

The story fragments. Different tellers push the character in different directions. One narrator ends Ahmed / Zahra's story with appalling violence. His listeners hate it: "Your story is terrible!" (111). They supply new, better endings, all, they insist, true.

So maybe I should not have been surprised when a blind Argentinean writer shows up to narrate a couple of chapters:

"I told myself that by inventing stories with living people and throwing them into forked paths or houses filled with sand, I had ended up imprisoned in this room with a character or, rather, a riddle, two faces of the same being completely entrammeled in an unfinished story, a story of ambiguity and flight!" (140)

Labyrinths, mysterious books and artifacts, The Arabian Nights. Why it's Señor Borges himself, visiting a Moroccan novel at the invitation of Mr. Ben Jelloun. The Sand Child is primarily about storytelling. Everyone interested in Islamic gender issues who picked up the novel has been tricked.

I don't understand The Sand Child well, even though Borges once again helped, pointing out a possible path. That Laila Lalami novel I read also pulled in the storytelling theme at the end. Tahir Shah's book In Arabian Nights (2009) is explicitly about Moroccan storytelling. Hey, maybe there's a pattern here.

Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits - a useful book, a mediocre novel

I picked one of the Moroccan books recommended to me, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami, and jumped in. I read the book all at once, over about two hours, which suggests a certain enthusiasm. In fact, in some ways it's quite a poor book, while in others it was just what I wanted.

One reason I zipped through the 195 pages so quickly is that the pages are unusually small. Another is that, I now see, the writing level is much easier than most books I read. Eight grade level, maybe? In a blurb, Junot Díaz calls the prose "spare" and "elegant."* I would use somewhat different words. Plain, simple. There are a few nicer touches, but not many. Picked at random (p.107):

"Murad sat down on the divan. His eyes were on the TV, but his mind wandered. Lamya was moving on with her life - she had a job and now she was getting married." Etc. Another word comes to mind - dull.

The plain prose unfortunately extends to the voices. Different chapters feature different characters. All of the men sound the same. All of the women sound the same. The women do sound different than the men, which is good. But, with flat prose like this, how could it be otherwise? What room does the writer have to differentiate her characters?

Now the good. The novel begins on a tiny boat - illegal immigrants from Morocco, on their way to Spain. We move back to find out how four of those immigrants got on that boat. Then we move forward to see what happened to them afterwards. Now, here's a lot of room for a writer. Lalami creates characters from many backgrounds - a disaffected intellectual, an abused wife, a restless husband, a mildly corrupt education administrator.

Lalami is clever with the structure. In the first "before" story, the woman who immigrates is actually a minor character. But through the story of a family she knows, we learn everything we need about why she immigrates. In the "after" section, we get her story directly.

This variety is the heart of the book. Lots of different Moroccans in lots of different situations. I wish that the stories were told in a more interesting way, and that the characters had more individuality. But as a quick tour of Morocco, it was perfect, efficient, full of information. Some of it may be wrong - I'll test it against my own experience, and against other books - but the novel gives me a lot to work with. I would have a hard time recommending the book to anyone not specifically interested in the subject. For me, it was time well spent. So thanks, Rohan!

* The blurb lowers my opinion of Junot Díaz. I have not read him, and am now less likely to do so. A writer interested in good writing would not use so many clichés, even while blurbing his friend's book.

Please clue me in to good Moroccan books

Ma femme and I are thinking of going to Morocco is January. She has been doing the reading, not me. I do not, it turns out, know where to start.

When I made my Senegalese reading list, I was pretty ignorant. But not as ignorant as I am about Moroccan literature. There are degrees. When I look at the bibliography of Tahar ben Jelloun, a big deal, I know that, the titles mean absolutely nothing to me. The Sand Child (1985) and The Sacred Night (1987) have been translated into the most languages, so maybe that's a clue. I don't know. An unusual number of the most famous books are memoirs, which may mean something.

As I have noticed with other young literatures, Moroccan books are generally short, so the cost of just diving in is low. That's what ma femme has been doing. She has not found the masterpieces yet. Plenty of good books, yes, but nothing really great. I think her favorite so far has been Tahir Shah's In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams (2008), in which Shah mixes Moroccan storytelling traditions with his own family story (he's the son of Sufi expert Idries Shah).

Sometimes, she has been more unfortunate. Stay away from Edith Wharton's In Morocco (1920) if you want to retain respect for that writer. Her grand pronouncements about "the Oriental mind" are best buried and forgotten.

If anyone has suggestions about good Moroccan books, they would be most appreciated. Books by Moroccans, or books about Morocco. If they're really, really good, that would be even better.

One disclaimer: feel free to recommend, advocate, praise, and sing to the heavens books by William Burroughs and Paul Bowles. But I ain't readin' 'em. Not for his trip.