On the surface of this novel, various members of a Moroccan family recount their versions of the family's experiences under the French Protectorate and since Independence. On a deeper level, the book deals with human memory and how it forms one's experience of the world. Some critics have found the Arabic original to be similar to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Outstanding Moroccan novelist and critic Mohamed Berrada first published Lu'bat al-Nisyan in 1987, and it has since been translated into French and Spanish. Called the first postmodern novel in Arabic, the story is written in such a captivating style that it has become a bestseller in the Arab world. Apart from its postmodern modes of narration and metafictional structure, the novel has elements of an autobiographical nature. Hadi, his mother, brother and other characters subtly portray the lives experienced by people from various classes and different backgrounds. The narrator and the narrator's narrator take these nuances and struggle with how a story, any story, should be told. Change in Moroccan culture and in the psyche of the main protagonist is painted artfully by the encircling wealth of detail.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
The Game of Forgetting ($10.95 paperback original; June 1996; 150 pp.; 0-292-70845-9). Subtitled ``A Novelistic Text,'' this densely layered portrait of family life in 1950s Morocco employs multiple narrators, alternative beginnings, and other self-reflexive and postmodernist techniques to depict its protagonist, the young intellectual Hadi, very specifically as a product of his unstable culture and in his conflicted relations with the members of his large extended family--all of whom are viewed as having contributed crucially to the formation of what might be called his polyglot personality. Both as theory and as story, a wise, humane, and deeply involving work. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Arabic
Original Language: Arabic
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
