Reading Morocco

I spent the past four weeks traveling around Morocco and except for one book read only Moroccan authors. Following are the eight books I read with brief comments. A few are well worth checking out but overall, it was a pleasure to read each one that originated from the locale I found myself in.

The Sand Child, Tamar Ben Jelloun, 1985. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, 1987. This is my favorite Moroccan novel from the past month. A father grown weary with his seven daughters raises his eight daughter as a boy. A powerful exploration of gender roles, expectations, and privilege. The narrative also includes an enjoyable look at the oral storytelling tradition.

The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami, 2025. Another excellent novel by a Moroccan-American. The protagonist is incarcerated because of the dangers her dreams reveal. Themes of surveillance, loss of freedom, personal data collection, and dwindling humanity in a for profit society.

History of Ash, Khadija Marouazi, 2000. Translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson, 2023. A fictional prison experience during the 70’s and 80’s exploring the brutality, abuse, and lack of humanity emblematic of a powerful regime.

Blood Feast, Malika Moustadraf, 2004. Translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, 2022. A short story collection exploring gender and sexuality in the face of patriarchal power.

Straight From the Horse’s Mouth, Meryem Alaoui, 2018. Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, 2020. A well-written novel about the daily grind of a prostitute in Casablanca who eventually is taken in by a movie director to make a film about her life. Another depiction of poverty and struggle but with an enlightening story of friendship and camaraderie.

A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me, Youssef Fadel, 2013. Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Smolin, 2016. A story about a young woman’s long search for her disappeared husband which takes place between the 70’s and the 90’s. More abuse and patriarchal power but tempered by a great narrative.

Welcome to Paradise, Mahi Binebine, 1999. Translated from the French by Lulu Norman, 2003. A novel from the point of view of a group of emigrants waiting on a beach for a chance to take a boat to Europe. A bit of coming-of-age story as well as delving into poverty, dreams of a better life, and the allure of escape.

The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers, Fouad Laroui, 2012. Translated by Emma Ramadan, 2016. A humorist approach to the human condition. Fine stories but the least of my favorites in this list. Some good quotes though, such as “It’s mad how we adapt to degradation.” Perfectly topical.

That’s eight Moroccan books written by Moroccans. I tried to find a few books with a more upbeat feel but those tended to be written by non-Moroccans while I was limiting myself to Moroccans. The Dream Hotel is a good introduction to Moroccan literature, followed closely by The Sand Child and A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me.

Playing at Cruelty: The Fear of Names

Playing at Cruelty, a short story in this collection, written in 2019, is my attempt to protest Trump’s propensity to rename things and a warning about the cruelty and danger inherent in such behavior. I don’t think I was far off! Paperback copies and Kindle editions available at all Amazon sites. And at various Book Boxes across Germany!

The Offing, Benjamin Myers.

The Offing, Benjamin Myers, 2019.

This novel set in a small village on the coast of the United Kingdom is more lyrical than what I prefer to read. I chose to read it though because I was interested in how the author handled the growing friendship between an older, independent woman and a 16 boy exploring the world outside his village. I have been creating a similar dynamic in my novel-in-progress and thought I could learn something from this highly reviewed author. I found the characters well developed, the budding relationship intriguing, and the overall story quite enjoyable and emotionally engaging.

Robert is the boy who leaves his mining village to escape “limited expectations” and before he meets Dulcie we are treated to wonderful descriptions of the path he follows: nature is expertly described, as well as the opening of Robert’s eyes to the world around him. He stumbles upon the recluse Dulcie who lives alone in her modest cabin overlooking the sea. She becomes a natural tutor and guide to Robert and I loved getting to know her and her backstory which we discover along with Robert. Dulcie has a streak of bitterness to her worldview caused by some of her experiences which are revealed as Robert makes a more permanent home with her. Overall, the novel is a coming of age story, as well as a reckoning of a long life, and a wonderful exploration of growing with another person and enjoying the simplicities and beauty of the world.

Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde, 2017

Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde, 2017.

This collection offers essays and speeches from the late 1970’s through the early 1980’s but reads as if it were written today. Not much seems to have changed since Lorde wrote these marvelous pieces. Lorde is primarily addressing black women in this work but her message is clear and clarion for all willing to read and listen.

My favorite quote from the collection, a collection full of valuable statements and suggestions, is the following from a transcribed talk called Learning from the 1960’s:

“Within each one of is there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.”

In the collection she speaks against politics, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia and her words are inspirational, encouraging, and anger-producing. She cautions, as the title suggests, that silence is dangerous and serves no purpose than to perpetuate oppression.

This is an incredible collection and an amazing introduction to such an astute thinker. I loved her efforts to empower oppressed people and to educate others to work sincerely across groups and differences to battle the vertical axis of power and abuse. Though I am not naïve enough to think that her words could have a positive impact on today’s cruel power structures I take to heart these words that it is worth engaging in the battle:

“It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.” (from the essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House)

Fat Time and Other Stories, Jeffery Renard Allen

Fat Time and Other Stories, Jeffery Renard Allen, 2023.

This is an impressive short story collection with far ranging settings and narrative styles. I didn’t sense that there was a universal theme between stories other than the exploration of Black lives, and this worked really well. Many stories were written in a style that I have seen called fictionalized history, speculative history, and alternative history where Allen reimagines the lives of well-known figures, such as Mile Davis and Muhammed Ali. I read in an Allen interview his suggestion that he sees this as riffs on small incidents in these peoples life’s and I found them quite pleasurable. Stories take place in Tangier, during an albino revolt, in Australia and in more local settings such as a high school.

If there is commonality between the stories I see it as the exploration of time. For example, in several stories there is the suggestion of Fat Time, or what I took to mean the moment that past, present, and future occur at the same time. For example in the story Circle we learn of a young woman caring for her dying mother but we also learn that she is also dying in the same manner. It’s more subtle than that in most stories, more like the feel of the narrative style where you float between past, present, and future. It is a fun, circular story telling method but not without worthy reading challenges.

The most straight forward story as far as narrative style and setting, and also one of my favorites in the collection, is Big Ugly Baby. The story deals with friendship, bullying, masculinity, and developing sexuality. It is beautifully written and expertly deals with coming of age in a time when norms are so aggressively militant.

I will definitely search out and read more Jeffery Renard Allen. He has an older story collection as well as a couple of novels available. Based on how much I enjoyed Fat Time I think it would be time well spent reading him further.

The Nocilla Trilogy, Augustín Fernández Mallo

The Nocilla Trilogy: Dream, 2006, translated 2015; Experience, 2008, translated 2016; Lab, 2009, translated 2018; all translated by Thomas Bunstead.

I read these three experimental novels from Spain in 2019: I enjoyed them so much I knew I would return to them. I recently read them as part of my research for my novel in progress. I was using a writing style much like the one in the trilogy so I gave them a second read. Like the first time, I was blown away. Incredible writing and wonderful ideas and general explorations throughout. There are many reviews available online, some as pleasurable to read as the novels themselves, so I will just share a few thoughts here.

The first two novels follow the same style: brief narratives and quotes which tell disjointed stories but which hold together quite well. Dream is centered around a tree with hundreds of shoes hanging from it in the middle of the Nevada desert. Each vignette somehow streams out from there. Experience leaves the desert and casts a wider worldwide net. Both represent a complex differentiated world but focus on the relations between people and objects: they rarely meet but the connections are suggested by such things as the shoe tree, a lone shoe in the middle of a highway, and a suitcase of photographs.

The final novel, Lab, has a more traditional narrative but still has flavors of the avant-garde. It opens with a 63 page sentence relating the story of a man and woman working on a major project alongside their decaying relationship. The story concludes in a former prison turned lodge and explores identity and its dissolution. The concept of repetition, present throughout the first two volumes, takes center stage in the final volume.

Clearly the collection will not be to everyone’s liking, especially for those looking for traditional narrative, character development, and plot advancement. I, however, found the trilogy to be well worth the effort to decipher the meanings and ideas within, challenging yet rewarding, and quite simply a great deal of fun to read.

When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, Judy Y. Chu

When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, Judy Y. Chu, 2014.

This nonfiction book is the result of Chu’s two-year study of boys moving through kindergarten through first grade and it is a fascinating read. Her focus is on the gender socialization that takes place at this age level, in particular ‘how boys negotiate their self-image, behaviors, and styles of relating to others in light of cultural constructions of masculinity.’ It was a bit eerie at times reading this because it continually reminded me of my teaching days and made me reflect on how I handled classroom situations: with hindsight spurred by this reading I see how I could have handled situations a bit more delicately with attention to the developmental processes occurring and awareness of the social pressure my students were dealing with.

In addition, I distinctly remember my gender socialization at this age level and through adolescents (though obviously I did not label it as such at the time). Especially resonant was Chu’s discussion of boys who struggle with rejecting stereotypical masculine pressure and the price they may pay for doing so. I, like a couple of the boys in the study, experienced solitude, loneliness and peer aggression by rejecting the norm and forging a more sensitive path. Likewise, it was heartbreaking to observe the boys who did accept societal norms at the cost of their relational abilities.

One interesting aspect of the book was Chu’s relating of the meetings she held with the fathers and mothers of the children in the study. She relates how they interpreted the changes in their children as they navigated gender norms in the classroom and in the home. Not surprisingly, they spoke of the regret they had that their boys were losing their ‘sensitive side’ or what Chu has labeled their relational presence. Parents also could easily relate to their children’s difficulties as they remembered their own childhoods and the sacrifices they made in their personalities in order to fit in to gender expectations.

How When Boys Become Boys informs my writing.

I learned of this book while reading Carol Gilligan’s book In A Human Voice (Gilligan was one of Chu’s teachers and advisors in her studies), and as expected it turned out to fit into my gender and gentleness studies rather well. There is so much information in this book that I can use to model characters and situations in my novel-in-progress. Especially informative is the aspect of the pressure on young boys to adapt to a clearly maladaptive expectation and the trajectory of their further behavior based on the decisions they make at this early age.

My story Idle Hill fits perfectly into this dialogue. In the story an adolescent male struggles with generational male aggressiveness and insensitivity and the resultant pain and grief caused to himself and others by the solutions he finds. It is available to read in my collection Not So You’d Notice at Amazon.

The Birth of Emma K., Zsolt Láng

The Birth of Emma K. and Other Stories, Zsolt Láng, 2023, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good & Ottilie Mulzet, 2023.

Often, while reading these stories, I was lost as to what was going on. It turns out, though, this uncertainty is partly what makes these stories so beautiful. Strange characters in strange settings and situations feed the uncertainty and kept my interest high as each story unfolded. The first story in the collection begins with ‘Our Lord’ sitting on a hill in Budapest contemplating who gave him the power to create the world. While this never gets resolved, we see him wrestle with his problem throughout the narrative, which seemingly has nothing to do with him. Lang describes this approach in the later story Chestnut where the narrator states, ‘We could go on in this banal but well-oiled style, because the external events aren’t important, rather it’s the invisible line of force of the internal happenings that guides the thread, woven from these sentences into a new pattern.’

Another invisible aspect of each story is an observer, sometimes seen but often not. He or she may be observing from a window or while sitting at a bus stop. We never learn if the observer is the narrator or simply a bystander but it is a powerful tool within the narrative, like the reader is sharing the observation, living alongside the characters and their ruminations. The story Loneliness takes place entirely at rubbish bin with the protagonist, Ildiko, standing by the bin while being observed by a stranger several floors above her. The narrative involves her observations, thoughts, and memories while taking out the trash but we know there is someone watching her and this ads a bit of menace and again, uncertainty to the story.

How The Birth of Emma K. informs my writing.

I found this collection intriguing and incredibly enjoyable. Not sure how I could pull off Lang’s style as I do not completely understand his accomplishment. However, I have experimented with the style in my stories such as Tiny Points of Contact and The Remove, both included in my collection Not So You’d Notice which is available at Amazon. In the former, the plot basically involves a kayak outing to observe manatees but there is a lot more going on in the protagonist’s head. And in the latter, the protagonist begins a car collection but it is what he is struggling with internally that holds greater importance.

Lang’s collection is worthy of a second read: for pure enjoyment but also to investigate his artistry, his building of a philosophical view of the world, and the comfort of dwelling in uncertainty.

The Loser, Thomas Bernhard

Ahh! To read Bernhard again! Thoroughly enjoyed this single paragraph interior monologue. I’ve read most of Bernhard’s work in the past and wanted to reread his oeuvre once again so I started with The Loser. The story involves three main characters: Glenn Gould, Wertheimer, and the narrator. They become friends at the Mozarteum in Vienna while attending a Horowitz class for aspiring concert pianists. The plot that exists revolves around the life of Wertheimer, considered ‘the loser’ of the group. But both Wertheimer and the narrator have ‘loser’ characteristics, evident as the story unfolds. Both are devastated in the goal of musical virtuosity by the already brilliant Gould. Once they hear Gould play they abandon their quest for musical virtuosity, feeling that if one cannot be the best one should not even try.

The novel displays Bernhard’s typical misanthropic and extremely bleak prose which might be off-putting to many but I find rewarding. I’ve changed my world views since I first read Bernhard when I completely absorbed his views and conclusions. This time around I find I agree with his evaluations but not so much with his conclusions. Still, The Loser is a challenging and enjoyable read.

How The Loser informs my writing.

I have tried using this monologue style before, specifically in my short story Owning Scars, included in my collection Not So You’d Notice (available at Amazon). In it I imagine a man reminiscing on his past cruelty towards his siblings and the story take place primarily in his head. Not sure if I pulled it off but it is one of my favorite stories in the collection. I am also experimenting with the style in my work-in-progress so it is good to get a refresher course from Bernhard.

Most of my stories are fairly bleak seeing as Bernhard has long been an inspiration for my writing but as mentioned, I have a different mindset these days. I still deal with topics which can fall on the bleak side but I am trying to find a more positive spin for my narrative, much along the lines of ‘yes, this is how bad things are but here is how we can change that.’ We’ll see how successful I am with this as I conclude my manuscript.

The Best of Everything, Kit de Waal, 2025

The power of kindness! Paulette, the main character in this beautiful novel, is a model of kindness. It is her primary defining characteristic in the many relationships she nurtures throughout the story. Not that she is without flaws: she can be impatient, angry, judgmental, and demanding. But at her core is the belief in humanity and the overwhelming benefits of treating others with love and respect. We meet Paulette when she is single at 29 years old and watch her development as she approaches 50. Along the way is plenty of heartache, challenges, and major losses. She doesn’t always handle them well.

A book about kindness and gentleness, grief and recovery, redemption and forgiveness. And de Waal is very good at narrating the morass of feelings her characters experience or refuse to acknowledge. I love her handling of inner thought processes, as well as relational dynamics, and there are many in this novel. What I truly enjoyed is how kindness is woven throughout the narrative, despite the excruciating pain that was evident on the page. A tremendous meditation on the power of kindness.

How The Best of Everything informs my writing.

I am impressed with the comfortable flow of this novel, skating effortlessly over the passage of time and the ups and downs along the way. I would like to accomplish that in the novel I am writing as my protagonist develops over time. De Waal expertly explores her many themes without stating them clearly, something I struggle with and have previously posted about. Her themes are clear though in the plot development and character interactions. It is a model I can use in my writing.

I love the theme of kindness and read an awful lot about it. I’m not sure though that it has been a theme in my stories. Basically I have been meditating on what might be considered the opposite: cruelty. In the stories I have published and those I am currently submitting, I address the victims of cruelty and the suffering they experience. Perhaps I can create more rounded plots and characters if I switched my focus and explored the power of kindness as an antidote against cruelty. De Waal’s novel is a great example of this.