The Last Friend, the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the 2004 International Dublin/IMPAC award, is a Rashamon like tale of friendship and betrayal set in twentieth century Tangier. The result is ‘a great novel,’ according to Le Monde, and what Les chos calls ‘a book of universal import, addressing all the horrors, past and doubtless future, that man has inflicted on his fellow men.’įrom the winner of the 2004 Impac Prize, a classic story of friendship and betrayal. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun eschewed the traditional novel format and wrote a book in the simplest of language, reaching always for the most basic of words, the most correct descriptions.
A handful of survivors living cadavers who had shrunk by over a foot in height emerged from the six by three foot cells in which they had been held underground for decades. Not until September 1991, under international pressure, was Hassan’s regime forced to open these desert hellholes. ‘In this deeply moving novel,’ says L’Express, ‘Tahar Ben Jelloun has chosen imagination as the response to inhumanity the art of writing as the ultimate liberation.’ He tells the appalling story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies. An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is Tahar Ben Jelloun’s crafting of a horrific real life narrative into a work of fiction. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.Ī shocking story set in Morocco’s desert concentration camps, from the Prix Goncourt winning novelist. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed’s life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. As she matures, however, Ahmed’s desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab Islamic societies. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father’s effort to thwart the consequences of Islam’s inheritance laws regarding female offspring.
In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law.
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