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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Moroccans Adrift, April 11, 2006
The immigrant story is a fundamental theme in literature, and all too often, individual attempts to explore it are suffocated by the weight of all the examples one has to compare it to. Here, Lalami offers a refreshing (and much needed) perspective on the topic in her short debut, showing a cross-section of Moroccans seeking a better life in the Western world. Its opening section, "The Trip", throws us into the midst of a motorboat of huddled people who've paid an unscrupulous human trafficker to take them across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish coast. The trip ends badly and Lalami then flashes back in time to four vignettes grouped in a section called "Before."
Here we learn about the lives of four of the boat's passengers and discover why they embark on the dangerous, desperate attempt to sneak into Spain. Like illegal immigrants around the world they know the odds are well-stacked against them, and yet hope to become one of success stories whose good fortune is recounted back home, ensuring a fresh wave of fortune-seekers. Newly married Aziz hopes to work hard and send money back home for a few years, building a nest egg on which to start some kind of small business. Murad is an educated English-speaking book lover, reduced to trying to be a freelance guide for Westerners on the trail of Paul Bowles. Halima is a mother of three, living in slums and married to an abusive drunk, she just can't take it any more. Faten is a devout teenage girl who gets into trouble at school and has no prospects.
The third section of the book is "After", and this is where we learn what has become of the characters following their ill-fated attempt. For those who eventually make it, the dream is not all they had hoped for. They must struggle to survive, and end up losing a sense of themselves and their humanity in the process. One of the most poignant parts is when a character learns from a letter that his father has died. But by the time he gets the letter and is able to call home, a month has passed, and everyone there is done grieving, leaving him with no outlet for his own grief and guilt. Lalami isn't judging however, those who must return home face the same problems as before. This is no morality tale -- these are complex characters facing insoluble dilemmas, and Lalami never takes the easy way out. Each of the four has dreams the reader can cheer for, but also weaknesses that undermine them. The book isn't perfect, one of the characters undergoes a transformation which feels rather false, but on the whole it is an acute observation of why people risk their lives to come to the West and work menial (or worse) jobs.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Auspicious Debut, September 22, 2005
So many of us know Laila Lalami through her blog, Moorishgirl.com, which reflects her Moroccan roots by often covering-and confronting-literary news relating to the "other" in our society. Specifically, Lalami has accorded non-Christian and non-white writers the kind of respect and analysis not usually offered in the "mainstream" press or even most blogs, for that matter. If this were Lalami's sole contribution to the literary world, she would have much of which to be proud. But now she brings us her first book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), a collection of interlocking stories, which also reflects her connections to Morocco. The structure of Lalami's collection is as elegant as it is powerful. The title story, "The Trip," serves as a prologue where she introduces us to the four main characters who will reappear in the eight subsequent stories. It is dark and cold as four Moroccans huddle with twenty-six others in small boat-a six-meter Zodiac inflatable meant to accommodate eight people-to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. Their hope: to avoid the watchful eye of the authorities as they travel fourteen kilometers to their haven, Spain. Lalami captures with clear and revealing language the brutality of the smugglers and the desperation of their human cargo. The collection is then divided into two parts. In the first, entitled Before, we see what drove Lalami's characters to risk their lives to escape Morocco. In these stories, we see the how desperate circumstances must get before one decides to leave home, perhaps forever. In the second part of the collection (entitled After), we see how the lives of our four protagonists change after their desperate voyage across the Strait of Gibraltar. These stories will surprise the reader. We watch as lives get turned inside out with people doing things that they normally wouldn't absent distressed circumstances. And in the end, we don't know which is more dangerous: the weary acceptance of poverty and brutality or the hope-driven risks people take to make life worth the effort. Lalami wisely doesn't offer any answers. Rather, she gives us potent and perfectly-crafted portraits of those who both battle and embrace hope. And she lets us know that the lives of undocumented immigrants can't be painted with one, broad stroke their lives are as varied as anyone else's. What an auspicious debut this is. One hopes that Lalami will be telling her stories for many years to come. [The full version of this review first appeared in the literary blog, rockslinga.]
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Little book, big impact, September 20, 2005
If you're a writer and you've tried to sell a book, maybe you've heard this: Story collections don't sell. Make it a novel. Make it 250 pages, maybe 300. Put the story in chronological order. Bring it to closure.
Imagine a publisher willing to break these rules and allow the writer to publish their work as it evolved naturally?
[...] (Algonquin, October 2005) is 195 glorious pages of inter-linked stories told in her third language.
The beauty and brilliance of this collection is in its unique shape. It begins with The Trip, and a raft full of Moroccans fleeing their home land for Spain. The strangers have saved and borrowed for the illegal ride and, when the shoreline is in sight, are abruptly thrown from the boat (the boat's driver doesn't want to get caught). Not all are swimmers, and they know all the commotion in the water will bring the Spanish Customs officials. It's chaos, and I'm pulled in, wondering, Who would risk such a thing?
The stories are then organized into two sections: Before and After. In the first set, we follow four individuals before they left Morocco to discover their very personal reasons for fleeing their current lives. There is teenage Faten Khatibi, who her wealthy friend's parents consider a fanatic because she's convinced their daughter Noura to wear the hijab and quote from the Qu'ran. Halima Bouhamsa, living in the slums, hopes for a divorce from her abusive husband that won't result in losing custody of her children. Aziz Ammor, unemployed, has decided to leave his wife and family so that he might send them money and ease their lives. And Murad Idrissi, envying the tourists he hustles for "the nonchalance in [their] demeanor, free from the burden of survival" (p. 114), dreams of the new life and wealth he might have in Spain, not having to watch his sister provide for the family when he cannot. They are drawn to the risky and illegal trip by stories of relatives and neighbors who've found jobs and send regular checks to their families.
The After stories hurt in a way I like to be hurt by literature. Their stories are as complex as the outcomes. Faten sometimes thinks of her friend Noura back in Rabat and wonders if she still wore the hijab. "She was rich; she had the luxury of faith. But then Faten thought, Noura also had the luxury of having no faith" (p. 144). Aziz discovers the cost to his relationships for going away for so long. In one especially moving scene, he receives a letter announcing that his father has passed away. Not having a phone, he calls frantically from a grocery to find them surprisingly with little to say and not the same swell of emotion. "By then his father has already been dead a month, and the event carried no urgency" (p. 172). Halima had narrowly escaped drowning except for a surprise hero. And Murad learns the cost of spending so much time dreaming of the future.
How lucky for the reader that this remains a collection of stories, that we hear the Arabic accent in the cadence, and that the quest does not come to a simple closure. We never learn whose corpse filled the body bag in the first story. We don't know the cost of time spent dreaming of a better life. We are never sure if their risks were worth it, only that they had to try.
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