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Terrorism Explained to Our Kids, takes the form of a dialogue
between the author and his teenage daughter. Using her ill-defined
fears as the starting point, Exploring all forms of terrorism in
both a historical and contemporary context, the book addresses
complex and pressing questions in an everyday, accessible language.
Because Ben Jelloun understands that terrorist acts come from the
perpetrators' deep sense of inadequacy, his arguments are all the
more powerful. The author, himself a Muslim, places a high value on
the importance of secular values, with which he believes Islam is
compatible.
"The Sacred Night" continues the remarkable story Tahar Ben
Jelloun began in "The Sand Child." Mohammed Ahmed, a Moroccan girl
raised as a boy in order to circumvent Islamic inheritance laws
regarding female children, remains deeply conflicted about her
identity. In a narrative that shifts in and out of reality moving
between a mysterious present and a painful past, Ben Jelloun
relates the events of Ahmed's adult life. Now calling herself
Zahra, she renounces her role as only son and heir after her
father's death and journeys through a dreamlike Moroccan landscape.
A searing allegorical portrait of North African society, "The
Sacred Night" uses Arabic fairy tales and surrealist elements to
craft a stunning and disturbing vision of protest and rebellion
against the strictures of hidebound traditions governing gender
roles and sexuality.
In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben
Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary
Arab social customs and Islamic law. "The Sand Child" tells the
story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of
Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the
father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth
child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named
Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges
granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies.
As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the
beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra,
Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the
rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary
events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the
listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the
1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and
gender in North Africa, "The Sand Child" has been justifiably
celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of
international fiction.
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About My Mother (Paperback)
Tahar Ben Jelloun; Translated by Ros Schwartz, Lulu Norman
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R284
R234
Discovery Miles 2 340
Save R50 (18%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Longlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize Since she's been ill,
Lalla Fatma has become a frail little thing with a faltering
memory. Lalla Fatma thinks she's in Fez in 1944, where she grew up,
not in Tangier in 2000, where this story begins. She calls out to
family members who are long dead and loses herself in the streets
of her childhood, yearning for her first love and the city she left
behind. By her bedside, her son Tahar listens to long-hidden
secrets and stories from her past: married while still playing with
dolls and widowed for the first time at the age of sixteen. Guided
by these fragments, Tahar vividly conjures his mother's life in
post-war Morocco, unravelling the story of a woman for whom
resignation was the only way out. Tender and compelling, About My
Mother maps the beautiful, fragile and complex nature of human
experience, while paying tribute to a remarkable woman and the bond
between mother and son.
In this extraordinary non-fiction novel, based on a true story,
Tahar Ben Jelloun traces the experiences of Salim who, in 1971,
took part in a failed coup attempt to oust King Hassan II of
Morocco. With sixty others Salim was incarcerated in a secret
prison complex in the Moroccan desert: he was to remain there for
nearly twenty years.;In starkly eloquent, beautiful prose, Ben
Jelloun relates the prisoners' experiences as they struggle to
survive. The son of a witty, feckless courtier who disowns him,
Salim tells stories to keep sane from the suras of his beloved
Koran to the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire. Even in the darkest,
most terrible conditions, sympathy, insight, the human quest for
meaning and understanding, never desert Salim. The resulting novel
is a wrenching yet exquisite celebration of the human spirit and
its determination to survive.;A masterpiece' Judges of the IMPAC
award;'a sad and splendid book' New York Times Book Review
From one of the world's great writers, a novel that mirrors the
journeys of millions who leave home for a better life In Leaving
Tangier, award-winning, internationally bestselling author Tahar
Ben Jelloun tells the story of a Moroccan brother and sister making
new lives for themselves in Spain. Azel is a young man in Tangier
who dreams of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. When he meets
Miguel, a wealthy Spaniard, he leaves behind his girlfriend, his
sister, Kenza, and his mother, and moves with him to Barcelona,
where Kenza eventually joins them. What they find there forms the
heart of this novel of seduction and betrayal, deception and
disillusionment, in which Azel and Kenza are reminded powerfully
not only of where they've come from, but also of who they really
are.
From "Morocco's greatest living author" (The Guardian), an
internationally bestselling novel of universal appeal-about the
powerful pull of home and the lengths to which a parent will go to
bring his family together Mohammed has spent the past forty years
working in France. As he approaches retirement, he takes stock of
his life-his devotion to Islam and to his assimilated children-and
decides to return to Morocco, where he spends his life's savings
building the biggest house in the village and waiting for his
children and grandchildren to come be with him. A heartbreaking
novel about parents and children, A Palace in the Old Village
captures the sometimes stark contrasts between old- and new-world
values, and immigrant's abiding pursuit of home.
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The Last Friend (Paperback)
Tahar Ben Jelloun; Translated by Linda Coverdale
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R549
R472
Discovery Miles 4 720
Save R77 (14%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Renowned for his compeling, humane portraits of everyday Arab
lives, Tahar Ben Jelloun has affirmed his place in the literary
world by winning such awards as the Prix Goncourt and Prix Maghreb.
In "The Last Friend," Ben Jelloun presents a spellbinding
coming-of-age story and a dazzling portrait of Morocco in an era of
repression and disillusionment. In Tangiers in the late 1950s, two
teenagers, Mamed and Ali, strike up an intense friendship that will
last a lifetime. But lurking just beneath the surface is a deep,
unspoken jealousy in danger of destroying them both.
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The Punishment (Hardcover)
Tahar Ben Jelloun; Translated by Linda Coverdale
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R608
Discovery Miles 6 080
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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An innocent man's gripping personal account of terrifying
confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a
formidable twentieth-century despot In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a
peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred
other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army.
It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they
were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them
survived. This powerful portrait of the narrator's traumatic
experience, written with a memoirist's immediacy, reveals both his
helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing
strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his
disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his
ordeal, he stole some paper and began secretly to write, with the
admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled
denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published
after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.
An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France and
winner of the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, This
Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by Tahar Ben Jelloun,
the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of
the 1994 Prix Mahgreb. Ben Jelloun crafts a horrific real-life
narrative into fiction to tell the appalling story of the desert
concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his
political enemies under the most harrowing conditions. Not until
September 1991, under international pressure, was Hassan's regime
forced to open these desert hellholes. A handful of
survivors—living cadavers who had shrunk by over a foot in
height—emerged from the six-by-three-foot cells in which they had
been held underground for decades. Working closely with one of the
survivors, Ben Jelloun eschewed the traditional novel format and
wrote a book in the simplest of language, reaching always for the
most basic of words, the most correct descriptions. The result is a
shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity
and the impossible endurance of the human will.
The award-winning novelist and author of the international
bestseller "Racism Explained to My Daughter" uses his own
experience to illuminate the experience of the Other in his adopted
land -- and everywhere. A Moroccan who emigrated to France in 1971,
Tahar Ben Jelloun draws upon his own encounters with racism along
with his insights as a practicing psychologist and gifted novelist
to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary society.
In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National
Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made significant strides
toward broad popular acceptance, Ben Jelloun's book is more topical
now than ever. His profound and compelling appeal for tolerance --
in both public discourse and the law -- is a passionate yet
reasoned argument that racism simply does not make sense in the
multicultural world of today.
"French Hospitality" confronts issues of international
resonance: the relationship of a formerly colonized people to their
onetime colonizers, the encounter between Islam and the modern
Judeo-Christian West, and the status of the non-European minorities
in Europe today. Underlying these issues is a heartfelt nostalgia
for simple, traditional North African hospitality as practiced
since time immemorial by a relatively poor and unsophisticated
society. Ben Jelloun supplements this rather noble ideal of
generosity and welcoming by borrowing the philosophical concept of
hospitality -- the opening of oneself to another -- from the works
of Emmanuel L?vinas and Jacques Derrida in order to illustrate the
moral conception of a nation's unconditional acceptance of
foreigners. Isn't the belief in welcoming strangers a fundamental
mark of civilization? In a political climate where increasingly
repressive immigration laws are a national trend as well as an
international phenomenon, he contends, it is not surprising that
racism has gained a foothold. Most hurt by racist polemic and
politics, he points out, are children of immigrants -- born in
France, their memories are those of the French people, and they
deserve to be treated with the full respect afforded to any
citizen.
With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun shows us
both racism's face and the immigrant's heartbreak; but he also
evokes the wind of freedom and the ideal of hospitality, and with
this gesture offers a kind of hope in extricating ourselves from
racism's recidivist incoherencies.
In The Pleasure Marriage, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the epic story of
a romance that explores desire and the intolerance for interracial
marriage in Moroccan society. Amir is a prosperous merchant based
in Fez, where he has a wife and four children. On one of his annual
business trips to Senegal, he enters into a "pleasure marriage"-a
temporary union permitted by Islamic law-with the alluring Nabou.
Overcome by her passion and sensuality, he falls in love, with
repercussions for three generations scarred by racism, immigration,
and deportation. Nabou returns to Fez as Amir's second wife,
weathering the jealous cruelty of Lalla Fatma, his first partner.
Isolated within her new home, Nabou gives birth to twin sons, one
black and one white, who come of age on the opposite sides of
racial, social, and political chasms and who chart vastly different
courses. The Pleasure Marriage showcases Ben Jelloun's mastery of
metaphor and lyrical narrative as he continues to take us into the
worlds of Moroccan culture through his exquisite language and
literary genius.
Casablanca and Tangier provide the backdrops for Corruption, an
exotic and erotic tale of modern-day morality, reminiscent of
Camus's The Stranger. Mourad is the last honest man in Morocco.
Much to the chagrin of his boss, his colleagues, and his
materialistic wife, he adamantly refuses to accept "commissions"
for his work. But his honesty goes unappreciated. Criticized for
condemning his family to a life of poverty, encouraged by his boss
to be more "flexible", Mourad finally gives in: just one envelope
stuffed with cash, then another... Ben Jelloun's compelling novel
evokes the universal dangers of succumbing to the daily temptations
of modern life, as Mourad lives the consequences of betraying his
own conscience after a lifetime of honesty and resistance.
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