Susan Abraham - Malaysia

A memory of Dreams of Water by Nada Awar Jarrar

Note: I wrote this comment yesterday in the Guardian Books Blog on the subject of mental illness.

I've just remembered this rather beautiful, melancholic novel called Dreams of Water, by the Lebanese writer, Nada Awar Jarrar. The storyline revolves around the protagonist, Aneesa an exile in London, accompanied by a good life and excellent friendships. But strong family ties and unforseen circumstances, compel her to return to war-torn Beirut.

Ironically, it is Aneesa's mother, Waddad who gradually takes over the ensuing dramatic encounters of the plot. Waddad slips into a lingering depression when her son Bassam, in the company of rebels, goes missing one day and never returns.

As the reader moves into the centre of the story, it is Waddad who will hold court, when through her grief, she develops a worrying blurred sense of reality and decides that a little boy in an orphanage is actually the reincarnation of Bassam. Waddad's confusion clouds her life in a startling manner, as she attempts to adopt this little boy and uproot the family-dynamics.

An excellent study of how a mother in mourning and stranded in a region where dangerous risks are apparent, slips into the initial escapism of fantasy and terrifying superficial joys for a make-believe solace and of how she comes through in an unusual manner. A case where mental illness may be seen as a necessary consequence to survival. Jarrar takes her time to stretch out the science of her character's disorientation.

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage

Note: Managed to recover this older book review on Canadian-Lebanese novelist, Rawi Hage's award-winning De-Niro's Game. It was originally published in Cafe Arabica, an Arab-American portal on current and political issues. I believe the site has closed down but I stay grateful that they had taken on some of my book reviews. Rawi Hage's writing is seductive and charismatic. It's time I slide Cockroach, his latest novel, out from my library shelves.

by Susan Abraham

 

44-year old Rawi Hage, a Lebanese journalist and an emigrant to Canada once lived through 9 horrifying years of the tragic Beirut war.

In later life, the author would rely on a similar tale featuring both discord and enlightenment in his debut novel and world bestseller, De Niro's Game. It won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for 2008 and this, out of a lengthy nomination list.

No doubt, his is a contemporary novel both experimental in style with its preference for straightforward narration and compressed with rude slick conversational gestures and ease of twists in forms exploited for different episodes. A man's novel, easily.

The conventional woman reader would require the necessary ability to stomach scenes of violence and torture amid the eloquent prose.

In the plot's boldness to seek fresh truths armed only with a crude imagination and the narrator's vision of reaching the elusive promised land, Roma; this reader found Hage's writing engaging, electrifying and sexy in no particular order.

Be warned that Hage expounds on a charismatic writing voice - picture the hot-blooded lover whispering in your ear from start to finish. The story may leave you breathless and panting for more. Hage is the master of his own fictitious manouverings, dressings his many chapters with colourful intolerant personalities and commanding his words to dance and swing to the grand sounds of a tempestuous opera.

Yes, such intellectual drama from any powerful book, may seek out the unsuspecting desired spirit.

No doubt that from the many high-layered blurbs splashed about the paperback, the Boston Globe captures its essence most fittingly when it observes among other things, "... Hollywood noir meets opium dreams in a blasted landscape of war-wasted young lives..."

Indeed, one could easily picture a cigar-smoking villian with a bombshell hanging on his very arm, relating the story of his life. A soothing sigh here and a quarrelsome shout there! A kiss here and a punch there! Such goes the tumultuous lure of the novel.

The theme in De Niro's Game, is the fall and rise and fall and rise again of modern-day cynicism when hope takes a tumble from a faithless ladder of belief and straggling dreams. It is of how survival waking up to its final feeble day, refuses to die.

Two intelligent best friends Bassam and George, in the Christian region of East Beirut where bombs fall from planes with dutiful regularity at any hour of the day or night and secret shelters are a daily pastime, wind down their wasteful routine with volatile temperaments and dull jobs.

Each must eventually settle for separate complicated destinies as a tough survival pack. Only one may hold the trump card or none at all. George chooses the thuggish militia as the materialistic chief Abou-Nahra's right-hand man despite Bassam's warning. The ambitious young rebel will later pay a heavy price for it. Under the guise of loyal political banners, George turns into a drug pusher, addict and killer, engaged in revenge, massacres and ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian camp.

Where will it all end?

George comes away the loser, crying over his lost conscience and dignity and thoroughly disgusted with himself. The tragedy is that George will cling only to the remnants of goodness and lose forever, his innocence. He cannot regain what he has lost, his criminal acts are designed to stay with him. Bassam is the wise narrator, insisting on the odd moral, conscience and respect.

Bassam does laborous work, unloading crates at a port but dreams of going abroad. Still with a nifty gun as a security blanket, Bassam also exhibits his fair share of flaws. Where they once sped about on a rusty motorcyle and - and how convincingly here Hage paints out the aura and childlike idealist of a motorcylist who with wind and speed as faithful companions, may feel the whole world to be his - to symbolise their childhood friendship, the trusty vehicle will later give way to expensive cars, jeeps and guns for George while Bassam will come into unexpected fortune and trailing it, a violent incident that will scar his life.

Bassam has a beauty, Rana, for a part-time girlfriend but is unable to hold on to her fiery demands.

In regular angry scenes, the possessive Rana threatens to shoot him, kill him. I'm surprised that Hage did not stretch this plot further but instead chooses to abandon Rana suddenly halfway where she fades with no incident.

Indeed while it is made clear that Beirut seems to have turned out the cynic in everyone, Hage makes no bones in sketching out the pain of a never-fleeing dust, poverty, lame jobs, wailing women and essentially, the waste of life. At first, Bassam narrates his plot with apt sophistication pertaining to the vein of a comic novel. Irony and humour supports the story of family life. Then the voice changes into an embittered growl even as the novel grows darker with the expansion of senseless violence and killings.The reader is not warned when this happens.

Hage's key phrase of ten thousand to puppet Bassam's highly-sarcastic and contemptuous thought patterns, is what cleverly lifts the novel out of the ordinary.

The book opens to...  Ten thousand bombs had landed and I was waiting for George. Later, it goes on. Ten thousand bombs had dropped like marbles on the kitchen floor and my mother was still cooking. Or even, I laid ten thousand kisses on her body, under a cascade of sweet, falling bombs. So you get the picture.

Plus, the fact that Hage never allows the reader to forget that there's a war on. The major limitation to a narration spoken in the first voice is that the character can only draw on what he sees and hears. When George relates to Bassam all the wrongs he has committed, the plot becomes contrived and slightly misplaced. Hage uses this technique to subtly educate the reader on detailed massacres.

But because the novel is spoken in the first person and the information has to come via Bassam, the reader can almost sense Hage's frustration at making the scenes of long historical detailings seem the normal course to any kind of confession or conversation. Yet, with a surprise and wonderfully-mastered end, the brilliant Rawi Hage easily gets away with it.

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Cockroach is Rawi Hage's new novel.

The Books I Bought Today

How exciting! It certainly felt like a sackful of Christmas presents. My book purchase choices were strategic and followed my deepening interest in translated Arabic literature in English. They were designed to help me learn more about authors  whose works I found beguiling and had begun to admire; and also, to adopt a personal affliation with regions that are very much on the cards for travel and exploration, next year.

Titles I Picked Up In-Store

 

Damascus: Taste of a City

Haus Publishing : £7.99/paperback

The thought of Damascus and all of its glorious wonders is to me, an enticing allure, not just for its layered biblical romanticism but also for its enigmatic historical intrigue and architectural value. World bestselling author, Rafik Schami who gained fame in 2009 for his chunky novel, The Dark Side of Love  and which also garnered him the shortlist for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; lived in the city for a quarter of a century, before being exiled to Europe. I was deeply moved to observe that even as Schami  pined for a lost Syrian love, his sister Marie Fadel , had wandered about the city, sporting a nostalgic air on his behalf while relishing atmospheric moods, sights, smells, sounds and tastes. Finally, with the embrace of exclusive flavours held securely close, she would then relay all of Damascus' quaint, lingering charm to Schami, over the telephone. I could only imagine the tender tenacity and the yearnings, passions, laughter and tears that would have surely both peppered and drowned conversations between the two siblings. The novelist would write everything down, but especially resting on an adored  subject of  Damascene cuisine. Hence, Damascus: Taste of a City was born.

With the exception of a scattering of black and white photographs, it is all of texts, highly personal  and already tempting with strong hints of street sounds, featuring exotic, aromatic flavours of the city. At a glance, I catch words like alleyways, neighbourly coffee feasts, classic Syrian recipes, and wondrous nostalgic tales of Schami's mother cooking for him and of his friends who regaled in slap-up meals.

(by Marie Fadel as told to Rafik Schami and translated by Debra S. Marmor and Herbert A. Danner.)

 

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The Calligrapher's Secret by Rafik Schami - a novel - Arabia Books London £17.99 (hardback)

 I had picked up an extract of the novel at the Haus Showroom (a highly elegant bookshop) in early September in London. Thus, I was impatient for The Calligrapher's Secret, released just last week. I had no hesitation today, about buying a hardback, even as it pulled me back by a cool 22 euros.

Naturally, I am very much looking forward to the read. Rafik Schami sketches the fictitious life of a young man, Hamid Farsi who is a renowned calligraphy expert. But the flaws incurred in the Arabic language over time and the additional disappointment of a heightened script limitation, causes Farsi to take matters into his own hands, so as to manouvere a risky radical reform.

Now, Farsi has a beautiful wife, Noura, who is unaware of her cold husband's steely ambitions. She is instead, drawn to the flattery of Farsi's young charismatic apprentice. The intense love story of a Muslim woman and a Christian man is soon born, from temptation and deceit.

(Translated from the German by Anthea Bell)

 

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Modern Poetry in Translation - Transplants (3rd series. No.13) Edited by David & Helen Constantine £9.95/11 euros and 80 cents. (paperback).

I once went to a Modern Poetry in Translation launch at Foyles Bookshop,  London, some years ago. It was a terrific opportunity to meet different poets and to reinstate the appreciation of varied cultural dialects, choruses, utterances, romantic sonnets, whispers and even the odd rhythmic line that would lend itself to a song.

Being a poet myself, how my heart wove its own tune, when I came across the publication's latest series called Transplants, on sale today. Interestingly, in this title that takes its inspiration from flowers and roots, the editorial questions the aspect of rhymes being subjected to migration, irony flourishing through the tongue or jokes being 'transplanted' elsewhere through dealings with foreign lands. 

I am enthralled especially with the reminder that this particular issue holds epic poetry from five languages; tanka, elegy, ballad, sonnet and ghazal and that the reader can expect prose poems, rhymes and unrhymings and all manner of crossings-over.''

The many, many poems stay a treat. I am looking forward to reading four Afghan poems translated from the Persian and a Palestinian one.

 

Titles Ordered In-Store

B as in Beirut - A Modern Arabic Novel from Lebanon by Iman Humaydan Younes

I was so charmed by the poetic eloquence of Lebanese novelist, short story writer and journalist, Iman Humaydan Younes in Wild Mulberries - please see my book review Here - that I feel presently compelled, to want to read B as in Beirut. I should be able to pick it up in a few days.

Unlike Wild Mulberries which highlighted broken family relationships in an isolated Lebanese village close to the sea, B as in Beirut, interlocks the  tales of  four women who live in the same Beirut apartment building, during the time of the Lebanese civil war. Each one makes her own survival rules as she resigns herself to a personal heartfelt yearning.

 

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 Learning English - A Modern Arabic Novel from Lebanon by Rachid el-Daif (£7.99 paperback)

Basically, the premise for this novel is one inherent to the majority of  us who seek materialism and a better status with the best of intentions; only to have a 'it's not what you are but who you are' conscience, crop up for the uninvited ride. A 'hip Beiruti'  Rachid tries to adopt sophistication and a worldly-wise manner by attempting to learn English. His cell phone and high-speed connections help his dreams along.

However, the protagonist soon finds himself battling with an old-fashioned 'clan mentality' in his village of Zgharta and his father's sudden murder that all at once, throw Rachid back into a strange disturbing quest that engulfed his childhood, where many searching questions were left unanswered. Once more, Rachid must turn away from the future to confront an uncomfortable past.

I like it especially that the suspense-filled plot is also described as laden with comical asides. I notice from a glimpse that the bearing of Learning English, appears to hone a similar gritty edge to the writing style with its sometimes humorous no-nonsense manner, a pattern of which I see so far in Lebanese male authors like Rawi Hage for the award-winning DeNiro's Game and a more recent purchase, The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine by Hassan Daoud.

Whereas banking on the literature I've already read, Lebanese female novelists are softer and far more whimsical in approach to a novel's complex plot. Besides Iman Humaydan Younes, I'm also recalling Dreams of Water by Nada Awar Jarrar and a girl made of dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi.  Which reminds me that I've just happily spotted Rawi Hage's newer novel Cockroach on my bookshelf and am making a mental note, to read it soonest.

 

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Spectres by Radwa Ashour (paperback/£7.99)

I couldn't resist this new release. Spectres tells the story of two different women, Radwa and Shagar, born on the same day. The narratives are said to alternate back and forth between changing seasons of their lives. The novel is described as part fiction and part documentary with its attempt to unite history and literature. Naturally, in the process the storytelling genre changes.  For instance, Shagar accounts a large chunk of her historical episodes, to the April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, a Palestinian-Arab village near Jerusalem.

Radwa Ashour, is an Egyptian writer and scholar with more than 15 published works of fiction, memoir and criticism. She is also a recipient of the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature.

 

Credit: Photograph of Radwa Ashour from PenAtlasOrg.

 

The Attack by Yasmina Khadra - Book Review

by Susan Abraham

Note: This book review was originally published under my pen name of Suzan Abrams in The Iranian as part of the editor's selection.  Together with another of my reviews, 'Let It Be Morning, The Attack was also chosen for publication in Cafe Arabica, an Arab-American news portal discussing topical social and political theories of the time. I believe the site may have closed down although keywords will still reveal this review in a Google cached version.

The brilliance with which the 52-year old Algerian novelist and French resident - this novel The Attack was translated from the French by John Cullen - Yasmina Khadra highlights the plight and eternal pain - even if it may be done through compelling fictitious episodes - of families who suffer the curse when one of their own turns suicide bomber, is beautifully fragile while reflective of the primitive decisions that still encompass society's present modernism.

When revenge and preaching utterances may be recited in the form of bloodied limbs and confused death calls, such strange doings and structured tragic consequences stay dismissive in theory but hold as real as day; in the murky depths of fanatical events that continue to replay themselves like eerie premonitions  in elusive spaces. Perhaps the most recent being the bombings in a Baghdad market, in Islamabad and in Hyderabad.

No matter the questions of the puzzled observer and the clever expert, there are never any proper answers. Forget the possibility of fragile theories. The mind of the suicide bomber already blessed for her spiritual martyrdom, is unworkable for a psychological penetration, mute to ramblings and secretive to disclosures. The  icy personality disguised behind a feminine veil, shuns any attempt at recalling the basic laws of compassion and the resurrection bearing any normal perspective of humanity that would have long faded away, by the time the hour of the ghastly act dawns.

To the neutral observer, The Attack proves insightful, guarded by a clarity of terrifying distortions which masquerades an image of a forced vague truth; one that shrouds the minds of revolutionaries, terrorists and radical religious worshippers.

In this instance, Dr. Amin Jaafi, an admired and distinguished Arab-Israeli surgeon at a Tel Aviv hospital is faced with an emergency call when an explosion kills several people in a cafe. It soon turns out that within the dead lie is his once comely wife Sihem; now represented only by a mass of sticky flesh for a body and the disembowelled mannequin for a closed face - apparently as is often the trademark of the dead female suicide bomber.

Then began the questions and interrogations where soon afterwards when all is dusted and done; the appalling deaths of each rosy ideal that for so long shielded a snug upper-class life, loom larger than life. The surgeon is horrified when his supposed saintly wife is declared the criminal.

Dr. Jaafi is himself questioned as a suspect then cautiously released.  His home  in an expensive residential suburb is ransacked by police, then vandalised by mobs. Some of his valuable possessions are also whisked away by detectives. He is watched and his movements recorded.  Later, all is restored as Dr Jaafi is declared innocent.

With the sole misfortune of having been left in the dark as to his his wife's furtive plans, the doctor resigns himself to  delayed shock. His sanity is saved only by a few close friends as the acquaintances he and his wife  once entertained with lavish dinner parties, and his own colleagues in the hospital now begin to shun him with appropriate alacrity.

Not that Dr. Jaafi is astonished in the least.

As part of an old Bedouin family with ties to Palestine, Dr. Jaffi had tasted his fair share of prejudice while studying to be a doctor in Israel. The curtailing of friendships and relationships by distrustful Jewish students, appeared in all normalcy, the appropriate orientation. It was after all, expected that the Jews would turn their noses up at an Arab. Later, when Dr. Jaafi goes to Bethlehem to seek the terrorist group that may have influenced his wife to commit the atrocious crime; he is viewed as no less a traitor by the Muslims who hate his Israeli citizenship.

It turns out that Dr. Jaafi doesn't care. Riddled with overlapping sorrows; that all appear to strike his bare body like a rain of bullets, the protagonist is forced to confront his soul, picturing them as different mirored layers to his deeper self.  With steely focus, he needs to seek out the truth and this new desire hurries him like a whirlwind.

With the help of his disgruntled and scared sources, Dr. Jaafi sets out on various nearby regions in the Middle-East to meet the fanatics, guarded by their robotic clinical minds and responsible for his wife's doom.

When he is finally offered strange revelations that betray his vulnerable trust towards a marriage he had cherished more than life itself and now threaten to shake the core of every fragile leftover memory, Dr. Jaafi becomes a different man and it is this new zealous quality that will block his return to the old destiny, even as he must continue to trudge a newer, harder one.

Khadra's story stays detached from mawkishness from start to finish.

He employs bluntness while dealing with grief. The Saharan-born author who holds a rich ancestry of warriors and poets, portrays a powerful plot born of catastrophe and  misadventure through the use of  a character's mismatched actions rather than the reliance of  descriptive emotions or numerous adjectives that act as hangers-on. The idea of heavy-heartedness as a trait, prefers to race along the plot with brisk purposefulness, rather then linger with a doleful air in the shadows. It is a tragedy  designed to engulf the story with angry flames rather than a staggering bout of self-pity.

Khadra's writing is also philosophical.  He injects a strict but masterly analysis of character patterns and behavioural  tendencies through events and trival actions in the novel, which is what makes reading him superb. It may have just been the reader's gift while dwelling on the plot, to have been afforded the study of complicated characters with meticulous ease.

Khadra is eager to share the character's pain with his reader but without stepping on any toes or carelessly creating distaste. With what could only have been a brooding thoughtfulness, Khadra draws the outsider, in from the first outset to inherit Dr. Jaafi's confused emotions and to watch with bated breath, the peeling of the hero's reasoning to a definite logic. Khadra's story is full of good manners....the author himself playacts the perfect gentleman while talking of full-blown horror.

There is diplomacy and tact that encircle themselves with raw anguish. The reader is never left to mourn alone.

Dr. Jaafi misses his perfect love story and the exposition of past romantic scenes with his lost wife, Sihem in happier times is deeply poignant, enchanting, childlike and reminiscent of all the magic likely to sparkle with a first love.

Once more, these sections are never overly-sentimental but rather that they are held up to the skies like a sparkling shard of glass being watched over for an ugly stain. There are no signs of scars and yet, the pointed glass is ready to stab any sign of musing that go wrong. The omen humming blight and affliction lurks as an uncomfortable bystander and grief is held to a sophisticated measure in the novel.

However, for this reader, two disappointments lay towards the end. One major scene was described in a predictable way so as to grant a reader the outcome of the episode, even before the book's hero had a chance to figure things out. The second lay in the almost surrealistic effect of the ending; something unexpected and extraordinary but which managed to spell for me personally, a moment of high defeat.

With the exception of the above however, Khadra has written an exceedingly clever and lucid novel. His lessons on contemplation for the reader are priceless. The Attack by Yasmin Khadra was recently shortlisted for the IMPAC International Literary Prize.

Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua

by Susan Abraham 

"How powerfully captured, the screams of dusk heard by innocent bystanders even as hope must surely rise within the breast of the dawn to wipe away hidden bloodshed." - susan abraham

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Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger, this bestselling semi-autobiographical novel, Let It Be Morning by famed 30-year old Israeli-Arab journalist Sayed Kashua exhibits a haunting and highly-disturbing narrative, comprising a series of political events that revolve around one reporter's brooding introspection of modern day Israel. Rude awakenings promise to seal the character's changed identity permanently and without consent.

It is the unnamed character's shock at seeing his township being rapidly stripped away of its familiar Arabic history and territorial links with Israel, that the reader must reluctantly come to terms with.

In the wake of a secretive and frightening roadblock by the Israeli army lasting days, where even electricity and water supplies have been cut off; the insignificant village with no previous drama to be mirrored to the world either than petty squabbles; is now sacrificed in a matter of days to the Palestinian authority. The cold affair is seen on world news. Lands that for many years, were held under Jewish jurisdiction are given away with no questions asked and no consultations made beforehand.

The ambitious arab reporter cherishing his Israeli citizenship works with a big newspaper in Tel Aviv as one of its senior writers. However, with the sharp rise of extremist groups designed to provoke terrorist activity, the reporter is himself swiftly subjected to humiliation and snide remarks. Attitudes change overnight as a long camaraderie with Jewish colleagues turn sour. The narrator of the story fails dismally in his every effort to retain ties with the snobbish.

Ugly graffiti comments on his apartment building, finally convinces the young man to return with his wife, a teacher and their baby daughter to what he wrongly assumes to be the safe confines of his hometown; an arab hamlet, deep in the heart of Israel. Instead, the plan backfires and with an imminent threat of war, the character is faced with a nasty change determined to seek out familiar lifestyles in his old hometown. In the midst of it all, the character chooses to brave a false embarassing front deciding to tell no one that in all probability, he has as good as lost his job.

It doesn't help that his marriage with his bride a trained teacher, is also on the rocks. Family ties hold them together in the storm of this personal calamity and the marriage through one wounding event after another, ironically mends itself.

What makes the story flow as beautifully as the soft welcoming sounds of running water is its skilled structure and deep probing reflections. The character searches his life from boyhood and describes without flinching; the messy confusion that descends on a calm society when the village finds itself without the necessary utilities. Ignorance of actual daily events on the national front, keeps everyone in the dark. A battery pumped-up radio may be a settler's only solace for news. Kashua describes the primitive desperation and panic that comes with a major food shortage - the sort that rob dignity and sanity and eventually gives way to theft, thugs and lootings. He aptly lays discomfort for the reader and may trigger a conscience without effort.

Spoken in the first person, Kashua through his character offers sharpened insights on what the media fails to show the rest of the world. This of how Arab communities in different states and countries view each other with all the usual banter that is heaped upon the subject of accents, traditions and rituals. The majority of jokes in the novel are afforded to those in the West Bank. While there is sympathy for what is seen on the news, there are also comic exclamations.

The reader is also shown through painful detail, of how thousands of innocent Arabs are often caught up in the troubles caused by a few. And of how fear in the name of survival; makes enemies out of friends and neighbours. Such observations were especially evident in Jung Chang's Wild Swans which described the Mao revolution where neighbours spied on and in Kashua's story at least, clawed at and stoned each other. And of how easily jobs were lost and education disrupted. Or perhaps too, the strange forms of entertainment that each individual would choose to prey upon, to pass his time.

There were those who preferred to stay in denial while others demanded to be kept updated with the truth which would subsequently be brandished about as the perfect weapon; in which to furiously let anger spill out through mutterings and curses long afterwards.

Besides, almost everyone prided themselves on a political opinion. The fear of death would ressurect itself like a looming nimbus at the sound of a single shot or the otherwise, eerie prospect of a military shelling exercise. Then there were the many wives, mothers and aunts who would applaud a soothing wisdom with hometruths.

I will not forget this story to be sure. It was tender and fragile but with a plot brilliantly-shaped that one could feel nothing but empathy for the protagonist and his people. The kind of empathy that tugged and tore at the heartstrings. This story cannot be faulted. In its underlying description of truth where pain was pictured as real and raw, I found no shortcomings. None at all.

Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua was nominated for the 2008 International IMPAC Literary Award.

 

Credit: Photograph from Br-Online

 

The Blinding Absence of Light by Taher Ben Jelloun

by Susan Abraham

"We live in an ephemeral existence, shouldered by any one number or more of varied transient tragedies that may be soluble and interchangeable in their masquerade to demonstrate the careful balance of ordinary life. We could bubble ourselves up into the fat round sphere of a still moment, engaging in its lively discourses and receiving in its meditative light; but only if we draw away the long evening shadows from curtains of the past. Then remembrances become impossible and time...once more unhurried and newly-born, succumbing to the infancy of the virginal."-  susan abraham

Originally translated by Linda Coverdale and already a bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light by Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, won the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The novel which establishes a consuming work of  Moroccan prison fiction spun from dark piercing legacies of dramatic mental torment, would see Jelloun , a philosopher and scholar and himself a resident of France since 1961, receive 100,000 euros as his celebrated prize.

The plot spells literary fiction drawn from a rare sparkling prose that readily confronts a disturbing fraction of haunting and searching philosophies. Nothing short of Jelloun's luminous poetic eloquence helps the protagonist; the  despondent Salim who with silent relentless questioning must immediately battle life's blackness when a present hope appears to have been eternally crushed.  The survivor then  crusades for another surety; his only concern being feeble breaths.

The plot races back with heavy exposition scenes to 1971 when a young cadet and newly-promoted Lieutenant, Salim, takes part in a failed coup to overthrow King Hassan 11 of Morocco.

As punishment for being labelled a traitor - although Salim and his friends had been dressed as scapegoats for disgrunted and ambitious officers higher-up in the bloodthirsty power game, - he is now sentenced to 10-years in jail and subsequently locked in with 22 other comrades from the beleagured army, in the cursed cell block B in a wasteland, somewhere in the forgotten Moroccan desert. Here in no-man's land, they are housed in a secret prison complex.

These are the luckier men as others would be most certainly executed depending on ranks and roles played in the failed coup. Here the shocked, sorrowful band of purported accomplices, would live clouded together by a crowd of dishevelled thoughts, mental blindness and neurotic emotions as gatecrashing cellmates. Only 3 men including the narrator of the story stay alive long enough to be released after 18 years.

Salim will watch his other accomplices slowly drop off the land of living like a fallen pack of cards. This, as they struggle fruitlessly against brutal psychological torment in matchbox cells with no light and only a hole for a toilet. During those long years, they will receive very little exercise, and feast on starch and rationed water for meals. Their prison is appropriately nicknamed pit.

Insensitive, uncaring guards make for grim torture with their puffed-up ignorance and disinterest. Besides the usual meal rations, the prisoners are left like withering plants to face silent, insignificant deaths. As a result, they fall victim to malnourishment, illnesses or the magnifying fear of forever languishing in prison. As they lay dying, they would be pounced on by cockroaches and once even a bucket of scorpions that had been left in a cell by a callous guard. In happier moments, they would often get together in the pitch black darkness that made for their space, to engage in political and literary discussions.

Throughout the long years, words revive Salim in its new role as  guardian angel. Each prisoner would embark on his own survival plan. Karim for instance would keep vigil for time and be baptised as the talking clock. In the long years ahead, he would inform without hesitation, on the exact second, hour, date, time and year like a calendar that never lost its pages. His fading memory would soon affect the near-end of his mortality by hinting of his death.

Salim on the request of this little group, invents stories and recites plays and poetry to his cellmates and himself to stay alive. He remembers Camus. Later, he would seek absolution and turn to fervent prayer by recalling verses from his beloved Koran. He would at a young age suddenly feel ancient in spirit. Imbued with an unruffled wisdom, he would ready his body and soul for any unwelcoming crisis that may linger, although a dim determination to be released continues to hover.

In the face of pessimism, Salim's love of words, continued to compose optimism to playact a ray of light injecting a stubborn willpower. At times, he leaned on family life, remembering with bitter sweetness, his hardy mother and shiftless father. The reader is pulled slowly into the depths of his own lessons which inspected without flinching; the value of detachment and the drawing of harsh, painful memories with which to stay sane. The narrator would master the flawless ability in the face of enduring suffering, to puncture the darkness with a heightened brand of love and light.

Indeed, Jelloun weaves an incredible genius with his philosophy on spirituality that would command every reader to a deeper sense of the happy self, even in the face of immense tragedy.

The Book of Eccelesiastes in the Old Testament may have approached these horrors with the same knowing tone of resignation, acceptance and enlightenment that lie conjoined with Jelloun's smooth attempt at a paralleled symmetery with which to bless adversity and affliction.

In his story, Jelloun strips the darkness of all its horrors with his studied illumination of its essence and effect on the human soul. The writer's voice is is gentle, tender, kind and accepting.

It is of a man who knows much but who speaks only when apt. To project serenity is Jelloun's gift and it bounces from the pages as the reader follows the prisoner into a hellish abode and  back again eventually, into what could only be described as a personal Eden; the land of the living.

Jelloun forces the reader in no uncertain terms, to observe and rejoice at every trivial blessing lived and learned, even with the prospect of death round the corner. This after all, proves the rare gift of melancholy mixed with joy.