Leaving Tangier

"As several expatriate Moroccans learn in Jelloun's latest, it doesn't matter how difficult life may be in the home country, a whole new set of difficulties waits in the promised land. Most of the novel focuses on Azel, a young Tangier native and a self-described 'Arab who doesn't like himself.' Desperate to escape, Azel agrees to become the object of affection for a wealthy Spaniard named Miguel, who takes him in after a brutal police beating. Leaving behind his family and girlfriend for the good life he's imagined in Spain, he soon learns that daydreams can be misleading — and that the life he's always wanted is causing him, despite his benefactor's best intentions, to self-destruct. Before long, Azel's sister Kenza, a nurse, weds Miguel to gain Spanish citizenship, then falls in love with an expatriate Turk who comes with his own set of problems. This harsh, unsentimental view of the risks and regrets of emigration — as well as the stunning realities of life under Islam law — is a stark, straightforward tale that readers can't help getting caught up." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

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... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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.

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.

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, who can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Morocco. He has won some of the world's most prestigious literary prizes.

Linda Coverdale, the translator of Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel This Blinding Absence of Light, won the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize.