Novel
المرأة والوردة
Not translated into English
Mohamed Zefzaf · 1972
Synopsis
Mohamed, an educated Moroccan in his thirties, has left a country “governed by a white minority of adventurers and pimps”, according to the friend who pushed him to leave, to escape poverty and unemployment. In Torremolinos, on the southern coast of Spain, idle, he lives off the European women he seduces, amid alcohol, sex and indifference, and falls in love with a young Dane, Suz. But exile continues to weigh him down, and two Moroccan friends, emigrants like him, draw him into a plan to smuggle cannabis from Tangier.
Context
The novel was published in Beirut in 1972, by al-Dar al-Muttahida. Abdelmajid El Hassib sees it as a landmark of Moroccan fiction, for the boldness of its themes, its language and its construction; Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla and Ian Campbell stress a labyrinthine form with several narrators, which broke with the nationalist realism of Abdelkrim Ghallab. Some Moroccan critics judged it “obscene”, others welcomed its affirmation of the body. Its Spanish translation earned its author a letter of congratulations from King Juan Carlos.
Who it is for
A short novel of 156 pages, in Arabic, in raw language about the body and desire; no French translation identified.
Prizes and reception
Selected among the hundred best Arabic novels of the twentieth century; studied, according to Al Jazeera, in universities in Europe and America.