Novel
L'Œil et la Nuit
Not translated into English
Abdellatif Laâbi · 1969
Synopsis
A man speaks in the first person from a body that may be dead or alive: stretched out on the red flagstones of an antechamber with padlocked doors, clawed by an “iron hand with five daggers”, he nonetheless keeps the voice and the power of an eye that sees alleys and doors. The narrative thus performs the autopsy of a living, battered body, in a language saturated with death and blood in which one reads that “man begot man for his own destruction”.
Context
The book appeared in Casablanca in 1969 from Atlantes, at the height of the activity of the journal its author edited, and was presented as a manifesto-book. According to its publisher, it was written between the bloody repression of a popular riot in Casablanca in March 1965 and the defeat of the Arab countries in June 1967. Abdallah Mdarhri Alaoui saw in it a disconcerting vision, in its content as in its expression. Reissued in Rabat in 1982, two years after its author's release, it was taken up again by La Différence in 2003 in the Minos series.
Who it is for
A short but demanding text, without a continuous plot, whose historical allusions need to be known; available from La Différence.
Prizes and reception
Presented by the libraries of Paris as one of the first examples of modernity in Moroccan literature.
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