The Happy Marriage - a novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Here is a piece from the Independent on a new novel by  Tahar Ben Jelloun that has been translated into English. Its about a not so happy marriage between a Fessi man
and an Amazigh (Berber) woman from Southern Morocco.  His novels always seem to catch your attention, but we sometimes wonder who is Ben Jelloun's intended audience.

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The Happy Marriage by Tahar ben Jelloun, trans. André Naffis-Sahely, book review: 'Living hell' for husband and wife

Tahar ben Jelloun's thumpingly ironic title fronts the tale of a long, fractious and toxic partnership

by Boyd Tonkin
Thursday 21 January 2016


Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the questionable claim: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

If what applies to families also goes for the marriages that make or break them, readers of fiction may beg to differ. At least since the age of Tolstoy, Flaubert and Henry James, suffering couples in the novel tend to run to type.

Tahar ben Jelloun, the powerful and prolific Moroccan-born novelist who migrated to France in 1971, knows all the pitfalls of his chosen genre. His thumpingly ironic title fronts the tale of a long, fractious and toxic partnership, a "living hell" for both husband and wife. The latter acknowledges: "We were not made to be together". So how does Ben Jelloun, always a resourceful and versatile storyteller, renovate this shop-worn material? Be patient, wait and see.

In 2000, a distinguished Moroccan painter has a serious stroke in Casablanca. Stricken by the immobility that diminishes him from a "brilliant, elegant and celebrated" artist to a helpless invalid who sees "a Francis Bacon painting" in the mirror, he has all the time in the world to reflect on his creative and emotional life.

His recovery inches forward at a glacial pace. Enlisting a friend as his amanuensis, he uses this enforced hiatus to compose a memoir. It swiftly descends into an embittered indictment of his wife, their relationship, marriage itself.

FULL ARTICLE

"Leaving Tangier" by Tahar Ben Jelloun, A Book Review

Here is a book review, of Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun
that ran in the Washington Post. According to the review, the book seems to speak to all of the crazy desperation that is palpable amongst Moroccan youth.

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FICTION
Living Far From Home

By Dennis Drabelle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 8, 2009; Page C04

LEAVING TANGIER

By Tahar Ben Jelloun

Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Penguin. 275 pp. Paperback, $15

At one point in this short but ambitious novel, a character philosophizes about those "on the margins of society," including "an American writer who'd lived [in Tangier] for several years with an illiterate Moroccan boy, while his wife had set up house with a peasant woman." There's irony in that allusion to expat novelists Paul and Jane Bowles, who came to Morocco to find themselves: The same dream impels many of the characters in "Leaving Tangier" to ditch Morocco for Spain.

The author himself, Tahar Ben Jelloun, moved from Fez to France in 1961. He seems to know the many ways in which people-smuggling can be done and, more important, how the uprooting affects those who submit to it and those who take them in. The story of Azel, Jelloun's main character, is fairly typical: He has a university degree but no way of parlaying it into a good job. Long praised by his mother as "the handsomest boy in Tangier," he decides to make good on that asset. After meeting Miguel, a rich older Spaniard who visits Morocco regularly, Azel becomes gay for pay, the pay being that Miguel will take care of the young man if he can find his way to Spain.

That he does, at first faring well enough as Miguel's paramour: The surrounding luxury is easy to get used to, and, in bed with Miguel, Azel closes his eyes and tries to conjure up women who have pleased him. But Miguel has repeatedly been double-crossed by previous lovers, and he punishes Azel prospectively by humiliating him in front of their friends. For his part, Azel comes to realize he has overestimated his ability to be who he's not.
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As the novel heads toward a brutal climax (but not the one you might expect), Jelloun weaves in the stories of other emigrants: Azel's sister, who embarks on a joyous affair with a seemingly flawless young Turk, only to find out she's badly mistaken; a small-time Moroccan-Spanish gangster; a Cameroonian who draws upon world literature to comment on the action. The novel ends with a surrealistic paean to the combined pain and hope of sending oneself into exile. Artful and compassionate, "Leaving Tangier" evokes a milieu of self-exile and great expectations in relatively few pages.