THE CURIOUS CASE OF DASSOUKINE'S TROUSERS, Moroccan author's Anglophone debut from 2016

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DASSOUKINE'S TROUSERS
FOUAD LAROUI (tr. Emma Ramadan; intro. Laila Lalami)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning English-language debut by Morocco's most prominent contemporary author, a linked story collection exploring what it means to be foreign.

Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"

One of Literary Hub's Books to Read this May

One of Asbury Park Press Books to Read this Summer
This long-awaited English-language debut from Morocco's most prominent contemporary writer won the Prix Gouncourt de Nouvelles, France's most prestigious literary award, for best story collection. Laroui uses surrealism, laugh-out-loud humor, and profound compassion across a variety of literary styles to highlight the absurdity of the human condition, exploring the realities of life in a world where everything is foreign.

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My Review: Funny, farcical, sometimes surreal...or do I just lack context to get the concrete reality of what he's saying...we have Laila Lalami to thank for this collection's appearance in English nine years ago. She set out to interest US publishers in a different book entirely, On Islamism: A Personal Refutation of Religious Fundamentalism, which is still untranslated into English (though available in Dutch and, of course, French) and which I myownself would devour whole, but this collection won the nod of premiering Laroui's quirky worldview to us. Deep Vellum does this work from multiple languages into US English and, every #WITMonth, takes a strong lead on books reviewed here.

The tone of this collection is deadpan. Much of the humor, culturally bound, in it requires a moment's thought to "get" but is never crudely or condescendingly signposted by either the author or translator Emma Ramadan. I find this refreshing; I am happy to make an effort to understand what I'm reading, and I'm aware people who read my reviews are, too. There is a lot of surface fun, and a lot of surreal oddness, to enjoy in the stories. It's a collection that tells us, no matter where we are in space and time, others in other spaces and times were and are just as perplexed, bemused, and wryly amused as we are.

Comme d'habitude, these nine stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers has fun with the fish-out-of-water trope, telling it in slightly Kafkaesque twists as a self-important fool has truly weird things...your trousers ever just disappear on you?...then even stranger responses to his predicament that are wildly disproportionate. Skewers every archetype of The Establishment. As the fool narrates his story to "us" (the invisible audience stand-in) he grows more and more agitated, and I grew louder and louder in my cackles and snorts. 4.5*

Dislocation does what it says on the tin...dislocates you. The question, repeated with variations. "What would it be like, he asked himself, a world where everything is foreign?" and we are off into an entire field of rabbit holes leading into misuderstandings, double entendres, miscommunications. What does Maati's "sweet, kind Anna" mean when she says he's "Moroccan by birth, in body, but "French in the head"? What levels of displacement, belonging without being accepted, are there in "sweet, kind Anna" (who isn't) "laughed in his face {when} even he wasn't very convinced by his pro domo plea." (An argument made in support of one's existing case.) Deeper and deeper, Anna the touchstone, the source of all the emotion (mostly anger) as the narrator, I kept thinking of him as the interlocutor, the straight man, feeding me thoughts I found funny-hmmm and funny-haha in differing proportions the deeper we got into Utrecht where he seeks asylum and has married "sweet, kind Anna" as "{t}his one went forth in quest of truth as a hero, and at last got for himself a small, decked-up lie: his marriage he calleth it."

He decides, stunned, what these twists and turns and gyrations mean. You get the same privilege. I was swept into the slipstream and liked where I went. 4*

Born Nowhere is hung on the story-nail in the wall of Melpomene's study holding up the tragedy's summation: "After all, I know who I am, right?"

That remains to be seen, Moroccan in Paris, trying to evade repression oppression and impression: "This story proves what I have always believed. Identity problems don't exist. We create them! 'Who am I? Where am I going? What am I good for?'" He's in for an ugly surprise, like so many in this ever-more-tightly surveilled world of 2025. 3.5* for its sketchiness, incompleteness of narrative

Kuourigba, or the Laws of the Universe allows us to eavesdrop on the coffee-house chat of several young men, one a stringer for La Tribune de Casablanca with a tale of Kuourigba to tell. A general strike, a blow against global capitalism, and the forces of reaction writ small, local, petty in the French sense. Much palaver there in the Café de le Univers, in the shaggy-dog story way of young men solving problems they're a ways off from understanding. 3*

What's Not Said in Brussels is just not sayable. How does a couple survive long-distance (a question I'm intimately enmeshed in now) and survive language mismatches and cultural cross-purposes too? Annie (who doesn't get his jokes) and John (who "mansplains" everything) arrange to meet in Brussels with the intent of breaking up, though neither has said that to the other yet. A cloud of seemingly random bits and patches of thought and memory obtrude, intrude, exude a mist of influence over each of them.

Never decide things in the silence of your head when they need to be enacted in the clamor of life as we humans live it. It's pointless and it causes a lot of wasted anxiety. 4*

Bennani's Bodyguard poor Nagib, those autoimmune diseases might've been preferable.

Another Café romp through what language does when friends, close enemies that they are, become, and embody for each other, are in full cry as they pursue storycraft to the detriment, or the exaltation in reverse, of mere logic. 4.5*

The Invention of Dry Swimming is so surreal, so funny within that range of unreality, and so impossible to convey in summary that I'm offering only this: "If this story does not make you laugh in startled awareness of these thoughts being expressed, seek medical assistance for your probable ischemic event." 4.5*

Fifteen Minutes as Philosophers feels the most like it was written by a French intellectual (it was) and aimed at other French intellectuals (I ain't). I can't decide if this is intended to cause embarrassment or amusement. It left me unmoved. The only one in the entire collection I did not fully enjoy, it was still very intriguing because I was uncertain of the effect on me that was intended. 3*

The Night Before Revolution! War! Action at last! Overthrowing the Oppressor!

...and then what...? 4*

LIVING IN YOUR LIGHT, sad acknowledgment of power denied, flouted, repressed

LIVING IN YOUR LIGHT
ABDELLAH TAÏA (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Seven Stories Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook edition, available for pre-order

Rating: 4.75* of five

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

The Publisher Says: A story in in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor from the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist known for humanizing North Africa’s otherwise marginalized characters—prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act.

Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.

Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taïa’s last novel, A Country for Dying.

Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina, the novel takes place from 1954 to 1999—from French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa. The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her. Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of history. To survive and to have a little space of her own.

Malika is Taïa’s M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.

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My Review: I read Taïa's novels to feel the world as I experience it from a the experience of a true stranger...étranger, foreigner, other, Other, the French don't parse things down near as fine-tipped as Anglophones do...who, like me, believes queer desire runs the world.

Save it, apologists for the inversion of nature that is hetero identity, it's just unnatural or we wouldn't have so many bloody-minded religious and civil laws shoring it up. One doesn't prohibit what people don't like.

As I was saying before that irritated tangent: Taïa’s stories center queer desire, feature queer people, are about things we understand a little differently than hetero people do. It's like a warm blanket in a freezing, windy steppe that isn't for you, doesn't give a shit about your happiness or satisfaction unless it somehow comes up and gives "them" a frisson of what you're expected to endure your entire life in which case shut up and stop bothering "them". This is Taïa’s reality, and thus where his fiction lives. It's a whole lot worse in god-ridden spaces than it currently is in the US.

So how does this relate to a story about Malika, an aging mother of eight whose life is ending, but whose track record is not close to what she ever wanted it to be? Her tragic inflection points are all around collisions with Authority, a thing every QUILTBAGger is deeply, existentially familiar with. She fails to keep her first husband home from the war that kills him, despite it being fought for the same people who have colonized their country. She fails to convince her money-motivated daughter to eschew the colonialist inducement of cash for submission and become a mail in a wealthy French family's service. Lastly, her gay son chooses his identity over her idea of duty to their country after he is raped by men in their neighborhood who claim to hate homosexuals...yet exert their sexual rights as straight men by fucking him...Rape is a crime of power, an abuse of autonomy and self-ownership, not sex itself, of course. That's pretty well established as fact. But someone needs to explain to me, slowly and in simple words, how the sex act they're engaging in makes any sense in this framework, given male penetration requires a physiological state of excitement to a sexual object.

I don't get it. But I'm back on a tangent.

Malika wants her powerful will to be obeyed because she is Right. The problem is she's correct a lot of the time, but that's not enough for her...she must be Right, and that is uniformly fatal to successful imposition of one's will. In a long life of mixed emotional results, that central truth does not come clear for her. It's the human condition to live life backwards, learning more and more as the need for applicable knowledge diminishes. It's the reason to have elders in the family system, expandable to encompass every level of social organization...a thing Malika would've reveled in, but did herself out of by insisting she be seen as Right. The world needs us oldsters to give up our addiction to the powerful substance of Rightness, and accept they're doing it differently now so offer advice without judgment.


As if.

So we read stories. It helps us all make sense of each other, helps us see the humanity in people deeply and fundamentally not-U, in Mitford's 1955 formulation. I'd offer all five stars with a big smile if the story was longer, developing the parts I was most curious about...Malika's time under colonialism would be so fascinating to learn about!...but this récit isn't designed to do that, and as it is written, is a beautiful evovation of a complex woman's life as a second-class partially empowered participant in a wildly passionately tumultuous world.

Her contributions to that world's growth earn my four and three-quarters star rating for their telling here.

MY PART OF HER, a parting in no way sweet but replete with sorrow

MY PART OF HER
JAVAD DJAVAHERY (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Restless Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In exiled Iranian author Javad Djavahery’s captivating English debut, a youthful betrayal during a summer on the Caspian sea has far-reaching consequences for a group of friends as their lives are irrevocably altered by the Revolution.

For our unnamed confessor, the summer months spent on the Caspian Sea during the 1970s are a magically transformative experience. There, he is not the “poor relative from the North,” but a welcome guest at his wealthy cousin Nilou’s home and the gatekeeper of her affections. He revels in the power of orchestrating the attentions of her many admirers, granting and denying access to her would-be lovers. But in a moment of jealousy and youthful bravado, he betrays and humiliates an unlikely suitor, setting into motion a series of events that will have drastic repercussions for all of them as the country is forever transformed by the Iranian Revolution a few short years later.

Over the next twenty years, the lingering effects of that betrayal set the friends on radically different paths in the wake of political, religious, and cultural upheaval. Their surprising final reunion reveals the consequences of revenge and self-preservation as they each must decide whether and how to forget the past. Urgent and gorgeously written, My Part of Her captures the innocence of youth, the folly of love, and the capriciousness of fate as these friends find themselves on opposing sides of the seismic rifts of history.

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My Review: Layers of response to this book. Most of them uncomfortable with the narrator, his assumption of power over the life of his female cousin, over the lives of the men who pursue her, and the general awfulness of a culture where that's just the way it is.

You'll see. It'll happen to you, if it hasn't already, and you will know as I do that the life you spent wanting to forget was in fact nothing but a life spent remembering.

This storytelling voice is the one used throughout the book. You're told what the story will do next, where it will lead you the reader. That isn't going to be everyone's favorite technique, but it's integral to the book. It is, per Translator Ramadan, a cultural staple and thus a vital part of the story being told. As she's translated other works from French in ways that delighted me, I'm willing to trust her.

How far will a male go to possess a female? How high is up, the answer ends up being; the young woman in this iteration of that seemingly eternally fresh story represents the startlingly awful answer of "into depths of manipulation and depravity that will revolt and surprise you."

The details aren't unique, or even any more distasteful than the fact that he uses his position of trust to rifle his cousin's underwear drawer; to cause a discovery to be made that screws up her chances at escaping an ugly, exploitive sysytem; and to ruin her suitor's life entirely in his home place while simultaneously looking virtuous to a powerful man.

So we're listening to the confession of a truly despicable boy...why?

Because all this takes place on the cusp of Iran's 1979 Islamist rebellion against the Shah and his paymasters. Everything changes...for the worse...very soon after the events of the story. Even here, my goodness if he doesn't try to finagle a way to weasel in with the new, hardline regime. The risks of playing a double game with True Believers come home to him. His much-desired cousin is suddenly more vulnerable than he is. She's a woman with an education and counterrevolutionary ideas.

She disappears.

An exiled Iranian author makes his Anglophone debut in this disturbing tale of moral turpitude and the cost of power to those who only want its benefits. The story the narrator tells us, finally revealing his ugly, wizened by lust soul to the gaze of others, doesn't so much edify its readers as provide a horrible example of the wages of the truest, most unforgivable sin:

Greed.

I read it with a strong desire to douse my brain in bleach to get the pervy little bastard's cringing Uriah Heeply gloating over his power cleaned off its surfaces. To no avail, obvs. I'm decidedly not edified at the end of the read. I'm damned glad I've never met this little lickspittle. I'm even more glad I can judge him from the untested heights of US cultural privilege. I've confronted that gift again and remain knee-shakingly grateful I was never tested in this way. Would I have done better?

IN CONCRETE, most-recent novel from playful stylist & SPHINX, Anne Garréta's groundbreaking first novel translated perfectly

SPHINX
ANNE GARRÉTA (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Deep Vellum
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

Sphinx is a landmark text in the feminist and LGBT literary canon appearing in English for the first time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First-novel longueurs are here, but they are eclipsed by the astonishingly ambitious project that it represents. It's not a spoiler, or if it is it's already occurred in the blurb above, to say that a sexy novel about lovers written without any gender markers is a very different challenge in English than in French, a very strictly gendered language.

Translator Ramadan took a trait that eased Author Garréta's trajectory to accomplish this complex feat, the use of a grammatical tense that English does not have and that makes the speaker sound ever so pretentious, and then she runs with its effect on the prose.

Soul heavy from too much knowing, body tired from feeling pensive and powerless at the same time, so riven by this obsessive ennui that nothing, or almost nothing, can distract from it anymore. Back then, if I recall correctly, I used to describe the world as a theater where processions of corpses danced in a macabre ball of drives and desires. My contempt and ennui did not, however, keep me from observing how this dance dissolved into an amorous waltz. Languid nights at the whim of syncopated rhythms and fleeting pulses; the road to hell was lit with pale lanterns; the bottom of the abyss drew closer indefinitely; I moved through the smooth insides of a whirlwind and gazed at deformed images of ecstatic bodies in the slow, hoarse death rattle of tortured flesh.

That is, I thiink you'll all agree with me, pretty mannered writing. I like it, but then I would; the semi-colons, the layering of clauses...well! My Christmas came early with this read! It felt like I was reading a good translation of Proust.

Yes, that is so a compliment.

What shines through in this croquembouche of a story is the way that eliminating the simple fact of gender enables a love story, a passionate, consummated love story, to take on layers of meaning that otherwise wouldn't be available to readers. It enables the narrator to muse on the unsuitability of their fellow theology student, a man, as a target for a fling, a little light sexual fun...but because the fellow student is set on becoming a celibate priest, or because he is a man? It doesn't necessarily matter, but the two possibilities are very different even today. They were even moreso in the France of 1986.

And now we butt up against the one real issue I can see someone taking with this read: A***, lover of our narrator, is Black. It's a fact that we're made aware of, and that plays a significant role in the narrator's attraction to and arousal with A***'s body. I'm not quite convinced it's exoticization, in the fetishistic sense. It's present in the narrator's arousal, though I can't see that being any other way...after all, the object of one's lust is always possessed of traits and qualities that are arousing, including physical ones; and there is not a single thing about the narrator's other appraisals of A*** that suggest a less-than-genuine interest in all their facets. What is more troubling is that the ending is what it is. There is a racialized account of violence and the actions in question take place in Harlem. Granted that the book appeared in 1986 and that was a historically extra-violent time in Harlem, in New York, and in multiple other major US cities as the crack epidemic was reaching its peak.

Still, it's a thing that is present in the story and that could present a very different impression to a Person of Color. I give the information to you for your consideration. I lived in New York City at that time and was routinely very cautious for my personal safety, so it's permaybehaps down to my own familiarity with the milieu that prevents me from seeing it as anything but a reflection of the reality I lived here, and then.

I will say that what happened, and how it went down, knocked a star off my rating. My respect for the project of creating an ungendered love story that still contained passionate pleasure is undimmed. It's the manner in which Author Garréta chose to dismount the story-horse that did not meet with my whole-hearted approval.

Nothing is ever exactly as one would wish it to be, though, is it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

IN CONCRETE
ANNE GARRÉTA (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Deep Vellum
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Garréta’s first new novel in a decade follows two young sisters who are dragged into one adventure after another when their father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sister, Poulette, is subsumed by concrete.

Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to modernize—or fundamentally undercut—the elasticity of communication.

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My Review: I'm old enough to remember reading Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau during the early-1980s height of Valley-Girl speak. It was snortingly urged on me by an older film-school-attending friend, whose encounter with Queneau's 1959 breakout novel was prompted by seeing Louis Malle's 1960 film of the same title. He said that Queneau did it better than the Valley Girls. I was, after reading Barbara Wright's translation, inclined to agree.

So here's Anne Garréta pulling the same stunt as Queneau, her spiritual godparent and co-founder of Oulipo, to which organization she belongs, pulled sixty years before. Is that hommage or le plagiat? After chortlesnorting my way through In Concrete, I'll go with hommage and a darn funny one at that.

I'm not at all sure, to be honest, that our narrator is a sex-linked girl; there's nothing in the text that specifically says she is, and there's a certain je ne sais quoi to the narrative voice that leads me to wonder if she isn't trans. It just *feels* that way. And given Queneau's Zazie has impeccable gaydar, ascertaining Gabriel is queer in seconds flat and constantly offering him chances to own up to it (he's a married drag entertainer, so there's your ambiguity for you) which he declines repeatedly (it was 1959), it would fit well with Mme Garréta's presumptive model and her earlier project (see above) for this to be so but unsaid.

Anyway. Manic energy, fun little not-quite-right malapropisms in a precocious kid's foul mouth, a family life that (for once) is loving while still being supremely dysfunctional...and all just as French as bœuf bourguignon. Does that sound like fun? I did to me, and I'm delighted to report that Translator Ramadan delivers verbal pyrotechnics that land just right. I know they did in French, not from having read them...waaay too advanced for me!...but because they were lauded by French critics for their anarchic jubilance. Having them come anywhere close to the original is a major achievement. Though not a surprise, given the nature of her translation of Sphinx as a linguistic exercise in French coming through in English as well.

Here, try this piece:

Lucky, they say, are those to whom the favor of the gods—or if not the favor of the gods then paternal klutziness—grants the privilege of experiencing things that deserve to be scribed!

Lucky also, it seems, are those who are entrusted to scribe on the tablets the things that deserved to be recorded, such as paternal klutziness and lapidary scatastrophes!

And even luckier are those, like Poulette and me, who are given the double privilege of finding themselves encased in greasy mortar and feeding the koalas.

Yup, the koalas . . .

Don't ask me why koalas . . . Can't you see it snot a good time?!

As for klutziness, if you don't know what that is, let's just say to keep it short that it's the specialty of generals, of top brass and rulers. But snot just them. Klutziness worms its way into everything. No need to be a high roller to be swimming in it. Klutziness has no end, no limit, and it's within the reach of any ol' poodle.

Epic klutziness, imperial klutziness, the lurid panache of klutziness pushed to heroic apogee and even to entropic scatastrophe—I fear we're the last of the klutzes.

We're not the last, are we, but we might just be looking at 'em.

ME & OTHER WRITING, a kind-of chrestomathy of Duras's amazing, varied career

ME & OTHER WRITING
MARGUERITE DURAS
Dorothy, a publishing project
$16.00 trade paper, available now

rATING:

The Publisher Says: In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras’s curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the “scattering of desire” to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground.

Me & Other Writing is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction. From the stunning one-page “Me” to the sprawling 70-page “Summer 80,” there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

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My Review:




Flaubert Is . . . 1

The Sound and the Silence

My Mother Had . . .

Atlantic Black

Letter to Centre Rachi

Translation

I Thought Often . . .

Horror at Choisy-le-Roi

Nadine from Orange

Reading on the Train

True Appearances

The Men of Tomorrow

The Right, Our Death

The Horror of Such a Love

Me

Summer 80