Mostly paralyzed and unable to speak, he is in despair over not having finished his life’s work. The book opens a few months after the husband, a famous painter, has suffered a massive stroke. The marriage in his novel is in crisis due to patriarchal views held by the husband, the large difference in age and class between husband and wife, and the relentless encroaching of struggles by women the world over for equal rights. In The Happy Marriage, perhaps Ben Jelloun is giving us a look at marriage through Moroccan eyes, inclusive of both those who live in the country and those who emigrate to France, as many Moroccans have done. I realized then how various are the ways stories are told in different cultures and thus how various are the ways life can be lived and approached, just on one little planet. I had read his most well known novel, The Sand Child, some years ago and was struck by a style of story telling that felt foreign to me, but elicited a strong emotional reaction. He is bilingual in Arabic and French but writes in French because to him Arabic “is a sacred language, given by God in the shape of the Koran, it is intimidating-one feels very small in front of this language.” Tahar Ben Jelloun was born and raised in Morocco, then began to live and write in Paris after attending The Sorbonne. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.I have made a goal this year to read more literature written in countries outside the English speaking world. 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. 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. 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.
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.
Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. 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.
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