Customer Reviews

Five Eyes

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A collection of five Moroccan men's-- Abdeslam Bouliach, Mohammed Mrabet, Larbi Layachi [AKA Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi], Mohamed Choukri, and Ahmed Yacoubi-- improvised stories for Paul Bowles, the famous American expatriate writer and composer, in the '60s and '70s. He taped these flutterings of imagination, often in unwritten dialects and sometimes by illiterate speakers, transcribed them, and translated them. Translations occupied the latter decades of Bowles' life, despite plenty of other things to be done. This volume is proof positive that he was not wasting his precious time.

It is wrong to label these "folk-tales," even though that is the closest I can get to categorizing them. They don't generally take place in some mythical medeival remove like fairy-tales or most folk-tales; they're modern tales, often urban, and feel very, very immediate. They are blunt instruments. They have the weight of strong implicit morals (as opposed to flimsy, explicit morals) unlike so many other folk-tales. They never follow an obvious trajectory plot-wise; you never know where the next paragraph will lead. Abdeslam Boulaich's "Omar the Truckdriver" is my favorite example. Deceptively simple, dead-pan all the way, very controlled, and strange and horribly sad. And to think that it was made up on the spot!

I'd even go so far as to say these tales are monuments to the power of pre-literate people's intelligence and sophistication. Also, to all that has been lost forever in our highly literate, highly educated, dumb-as-dirt culture.

I highly recommend the work of the translator and all contributors (shouldn't it be called TEN EYES?) save Boulaich, because this was the only thing he ever published as far as I can tell.