The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "THERE WAS A SADNESS IN THE stillness of dusk..." (more)
Key Phrases: Dar Khalifa, Caliph's House, Art Deco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. When Shah, his pregnant wife and their small daughter move from England to Morocco, where he'd vacationed as a child, he enters a realm of "invisible spirits and their parallel world." Shah buys the Caliph's House, once a palatial compound, now heavy with algae, cobwebs and termites. Unoccupied for a decade, the place harbors a willful jinni (invisible spirit), who Shah, the rational Westerner, reluctantly grasps must be exorcised by traditional means. As Shah remodels the haunted house, he encounters a cast of entertaining, sometimes bizarre characters. Three retainers, whose lives are governed by the jinni, have attached themselves to the property. Confounding craftsmen plague but eventually beautify the house. Intriguing servants come and go, notably Zohra, whose imaginary friend, a 100-foot tall jinni, lives on her shoulder. A "gangster neighbor and his trophy wife" conspire to acquire the Caliph's House, and a countess remembers Shah's grandfather and his secrets. Passers-through offer eccentricity (Kenny, visiting 15 cities on five continents where Casablanca is playing; Pete, a convert to Islam, seeking "a world without America"). There is a thin, dark post-9/11 thread in Shah's elegantly woven tale. The dominant colors, however, are luminous. "[L]ife not filled with severe learning curves was no life at all," Shah observes. Trailing Shah through his is sheer delight. Illus. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

It's been 20 years since Peter Mayle wrote his bestseller A Year in Provence, and there's no sign yet of the "Year In ..." franchise flagging. After all, what two-week vacationer could fail to dream of a year in Provence, Marrakesh or Tuscany? These are modern Mediterranean fairy tales, and they're put together with the simplest ingredients: magical neighbors, hellish builders and much more olive oil than you expected. The Caliph's House looks like one of those books, but it isn't. British travel writer Tahir Shah's highly readable account of moving his young family to Casablanca is constructed with something weirder and sharper: vinegar, perhaps, and ectoplasm. It opens ordinarily enough. Shah is at a Casablanca lawyer's office, signing the sale contract, taking in the view of the street, ruminating on why he had always wanted to skip the grey skies of England for the warmth and color of Morocco. He picks up the heavy old key. The caliph's house is his. At that very moment, a car bomb explodes outside the lawyer's office, covering them both with broken glass. An eerie portent of things to come, perhaps. Shah's new home, the vast Caliph's House, has been empty for 10 years and now stands decrepit, if not derelict, on the fringe of a shantytown. With it, Shah finds that he has also acquired staff: three lugubrious and potentially sinister "guardians," who come "as if by some medieval right of sale." More medieval still, a vengeful she-jinn called Qandisha haunts the house, they say. Over the next few months she reveals her presence in various grisly ways: stringing cats up in trees and sucking raw meat through the toilet bowl. Children are said to be her favorite target. It may be no coincidence that the local gangster wants them out so he can steal the land. Down in the shantytown an elderly stamp-collector, who will take no money for teaching the author Arabic but likes his foreign stamps, gives him some amiable advice: "You put mannequins in the children's beds, and tell your children to sleep in the oven each night. Do that, and you will all be safe." An educated young lady Shah hires to get the renovations underway ultimately claims to have a 300-meter-tall jinn sitting at her shoulder, cleans out Shah's bank account and reports him as a terrorist to the police. Her replacement -- the crafty, efficient Kamal -- is a binge-drinker on a perpetual high-wire, a sort of psychopathic Jeeves whose brutal and bizarre history includes a long interlude in the United States, where he made the acquaintance of Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker. Yet nothing in Casablanca is quite as odd as Shah's determination to carry on as usual. He and his imperturbable wife want servants, a big house in the sun and a bellyful of local color for their two toddlers. What they get is the local custom of dropping gobbets of raw chicken into the well to appease the jinns, and a bellyful of streptococcus. It's almost fatal, but they don't flush the key down the one working lavatory and get a cab to the airport. The thought briefly flits through Shah's mind, but it doesn't take hold. Instead, we are led on a darkly comic journey into the North African underworld, with the reckless but thoroughly well-connected Kamal as chaperone to Shah's dubious Dante. The joke is that Shah, in spite of his Afghan heritage, in spite of his descent from the Prophet, is a man with a rationalist moral gyroscope. He doesn't believe in jinns, which everyone else seems to have like head lice. He's bothered by rats, he has servant trouble, he discovers the desperate shifts the poor make to survive -- the stealing, the sudden flashes of dignity, the mutual aid networks that underpin the black market, the medieval superstitions. Nothing works quite the way it works in a mature, liberal, democratic capitalist society. Everything has a price, but the routes to that price are devious and surprising. Every explanation raises more questions than it answers: Shah has baffling encounters and warily follows instructions he cannot understand. One night he is taken to a mysterious rendezvous in the desert and expects to be killed, but nothing happens. Another day he gives a lift to an old man who steals his car. Fifteen minutes later, the elderly thief drives back, apologizing that if he took the car for good, no one would ever give an old man a lift again. It's in this sly side-step from common reality that the Shah persona comes into its own. He doesn't play it too knowingly, but he doesn't play himself for a fool, either. If Kamal is a Jeeves on amphetamines, Shah is no woolly-headed Wooster. He finds himself a very good fixer. He gets the house superbly done, with tiling and the tadelakt, so that he and his family can leave the single room they've occupied all year. And he finds out a lot about his grandfather, a widower who retired to Morocco because it was the one place he'd never traveled with his adored wife; he lived for years in Tangiers before being struck dead by a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Shah writes an outrageously black comedy with the straightest of poker faces. And in some quiet alchemical way, he finds himself at peace with the guardians and the imam and the gangster down the road and the shanty dwellers on his doorstep and the bank manager at home. He's living there still. Jason Goodwin is the author of "Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire." His Ottoman mystery novel, "The Janissary Tree," will be published in May. Reviewed by Jason Goodwin
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; First Edition edition (January 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553803999
• ISBN-13: 978-0553803990
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #137,428 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #11 in

  Books > Travel > Africa > Morocco

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Culture Shock and Comedy, April 16, 2006

By	Bart King (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a very funny and readable account of Tahir Shah's ordeals trying to remodel a decrepit palace in Casablanca. In some ways, Shah's account reads like a man's Moroccan version of UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. It's less romantic and food-oriented, but references the similar nightmares and pleasures involved with restoring an ancient dwelling.

This book is VERY funny. Tahir Shah is an Englshman of Afghani descent, so Morocco really is a culture shock for him. The odd and "backwards" aspects of trying to get things done in Morocco are amusing and educational. For instance, Shah ends up having to have the house exorcised for jinni (genies) and even having to take a second wife (it's not what you might think) to finish the project.

Looking at the other reader reviews below, it's clear that I'm not the only one with a high opinion of THE CALIPH'S HOUSE. Trust us!

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exotic and charming, April 7, 2006

By	Veggiechiliqueen - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

I found out about Tahir Shah's "The Caliph's House" in an issue of the International Herald Tribune. Although I've lived in Spain, speak French, and have many friends from Northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco), I've not yet had the pleasure of visiting Morocco, where Tahir Shah moved his wife Rachana and children to escape the stale, boring life of London.

Raised by an Afghan father on tribal legends and childhood treks through the Atlas Mountains, Shah is drawn by the sense of exotic beauty and deep-seated cultural values of Morocco, enough so that he purchases a run-down estate in a shantytown. The Caliph's House is filled with traces by bygone beauty: secret gardens in inner courtyards, mysterious locked rooms, and unlimited potential for restoration: the beautiful bejmat mosaics and fountains that Islamic art has been famous for for centuries, carved cedar shelves, grand doors.

Shah quickly realizes that despite its French appearance and legacy, Casablanca is purely North African, governed by age-old ritual and superstition: Jinns that rule his new home and cause accidents and deaths, workmen that never finish a single project, the constant headache of bargaining for every item needed for restoration, living next to seething slums where Arab Gulf Al-Qaeda members are recruiting in the local mosque.

The cast of characters is immensely entertaining, serving to outline the contrasts in modern Morocco: a French countess who was a friend of Shah's grandfather, a pessimistic French diplomat, an elderly stamp collector who trades stamps for stories, three guardians who come with the house but end up causing nothing but headaches, a local gangster and his trophy wife, and the servants that Shah hires to attempt to add rule and order back to his life, but who quickly teach him that to accomplish anything, he needs to think like a true Moroccan.

Unlike the myriad of home restoration shows on the BBC and HGTV, Shah's project is plagued by disaster from the beginning: a phony architect and his bungling workers knock down walls with glee, Shah's black market sand provider is jailed on prostitution charges, his mail-order furniture from India (ordered after several glasses of wine)and personal library of 10,000 books is held hostage by Moroccan customs, and the supposed haunting by Jinns is enough to nearly drive Shah and family from Dar Khalifa, but cooler heads and a new cultural awakening prevails. Shah learns to admire the wealth of cultural traditions that guide Morocco, reconnects with his famous grandfather, who spent the last years of his life in Casablanca, and finds the journey ultimately rewarding.

Full of sharp humour, eagle-eyed observations gleaned from a lifetime of travels, and an eye for beauty, "The Caliph's House" is a delightful, exotic journey into the cultural heart of Morocco, full of whispering fountains, lush secret gardens, the glitter of glazed tile mosaics, the muezzin's chant, and the call of the unknown.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A well-written, fun read, June 3, 2006

By	J. Davis (Portland Oregon) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I couldn't put this book down. My husband is Moroccan and I've spent a lot of time with in his family home there. I could relate to a lot of Shah's descriptions, based on my own and friends' experiences. Shah's writing is wonderful, funny and not at all condescending like other "live abroad" books.