Book 21 - Tahar Ben Jelloun "A Palace in the Old Village"

Tahar Ben Jelloun "A Palace in the Old Village" ((Arcadia Books)





Mohammed left Morocco as a young man to work in an automobile plant in France. He later brought his family to France. It has now been forty years and Mohammed is now facing retirement, which he considers unimaginable. The important things in this illiterate man’s life are his faith, his family, and his work routine. As the latter comes to an end, he becomes reflective and turns towards the other two things to fill the gap. The thing is, while Mohammed has been in 40 years in France, he never really has ‘left the old country, while his children have grown up and assimilated into the culture around them—some even obtaining permanent citizenship.

To some extent, this is a story of parents and children. Those of us with grown children know that children are not ours forever (sometimes we learn this painfully and repeatedly). Mohammed understands this, but like any good parent he worries and frets about his children (this one has married a Christian, that one never calls...etc); it’s just that there’s not just the parent-child gap here, there’s a cultural generational gap too. One cannot help sympathize with Mohammed, who is kind, honorable, old-fashioned and doomed to be disappointed.

The story is also about what his faith means to him. His culture and faith are intricately tied together and we learn about both together. As we learn about how Mohammed thinks, we understand how big the gap between him and his children really is.

Now retired, Mohammed fantasizes about returning to his old village and building a large house there, big enough for him and his wife, all of these children and their families, for a special prayer room...everything important to him. And he sets about doing this, and as he does, the story begins to drift into something less realistic and more folk tale-like.

This short book is absolutely fascinating for its window into another culture very different than our own. And I think the unusual change in the nature of the narrative at the end of the story fits very nicely with Mohammed's search for ‘home’.

Book 22 - Ted Hughes "Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow"

Ted Hughes "Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow" (Faber & Faber)




A powerful work in which every poem reads like a howl of anguish from the earth's very bowels of despair, Crow is a bloody, brutal and beautiful collection. Published in 1970, six years after Hughes' first wife, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide, and one year after his second wife, Assia Wevill, also committed suicide (and killed their four-year-old daughter at the same time), the book is shot through with imagery of death, blood, destruction, foulness, and blackness. The sequence features the character of Crow, a quasi-mythological beast who stands as both a pseudo-deity and also a domesticated, everyday figure (in a way reminding me of Geryon from Anne Carson's re-telling of the Hercules myth, Autobiography of Red). The unspeakable tragedy in Hughes' life bears fruit in the imagery he conjures here, so gory and despairing it is almost comic.

In "A Kill", Crow is "nailed down by his own ribs"; in "Crow and Mama" we learn that "When Crow cried his mother's ear / scorched to a stump". In "Crow Blacker Than Ever" we find him "nailing Heaven and Earth together" but "the agony did not diminish." It goes on. Man is "a walking abbatoir"; a dog is a "bulging filter bag"; Man's soul is given to him by Crow from "the Worm, God's only son", while in "A Bedtime Story" (perhaps my favourite poem from this collection), the weary conclusion is that "Creation had failed again." In Hughes' alternative creation myth, humans are destructive, filthy parasites; God sleeps while Crow laughs, or cries, or chews the flesh of the Creator. And yet from time to time, these large-scale, mythical images will be interrupted by (no less horrifying) imagery from human life: in "Crow's Account of Saint George", he "runs dumb-faced from the house / Where his wife and children lie in their blood." The suggestion, ultimately, is that while there are aspects of the human and the frail within even the most potent myths, there are two elements of the mythological in our everyday lives.

In Crow, the elemental power of Hughes' poetry finds its darkest vision.

Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death's mouldy tits.