Novel
The Sacred Night
La Nuit sacrée
Tahar Ben Jelloun · 1987
Synopsis
Zahra, whom her father, ashamed of having only daughters, had raised as a boy under the name Ahmed, receives from him, at the moment of his death, during the sacred night of Ramadan, permission to become the woman she was never able to be. On the day of the burial, a stranger on horseback carries her off, dressed in a bridal burnous; there begins the wandering of a woman in a Muslim country, where she suffers rape and pain before ending up in the house of a blind man, the Consul, and his sister. Having become the storyteller of herself, Zahra tells of this second life.
Context
The novel was published by Seuil on 1 September 1987, two years after the book of which it is the sequel, but can be read on its own. Jean-Louis Joubert sees in it a new variation on the Arabic tale, and Publishers Weekly compared its phantasmagoria to the magical realism of García Márquez and Rushdie. Alan Sheridan translated it into English in 1989, and Nicolas Klotz brought it to the screen in 1993, combining it with the preceding novel.
Who it is for
A brief novel, in an incantatory prose that mixes the real and the marvellous; available in paperback in the Points series.
Prizes and reception
Prix Goncourt 1987, the first awarded to a Maghreb writer; more than four hundred thousand copies sold.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.