Wedding By the Sea [Hardcover]

Abdelkader Benali (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2000

Twenty-year-old Dutch-Moroccan, Lamarat Minar, is given the unenviable task of tracing his errant uncle and returning him to his waiting bride, Lamarat's sister, Rebekka. After many u-turns, detours and hairpins, the uncle is discovered in a brothel, from which Lamarat has to extract him.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nostalgia for an imagined past drives this fable-like first novel of diaspora and return, winner of the 1996 Best Literary Debut Prize in Holland and the Best First Novel in a Foreign Language award in France. Lamarat Minar's father moved the family to Ollanda (Holland) when Lamarat was six months old and his mother was pregnant with his sister. Nineteen years later Lamarat and his family have returned to their native village in North Africa for his sister Rebekka's marriage to their uncle Mosa, who is looking to emigrate with a lovely young bride. When Mosa panics and races off to his favorite brothel the morning of the scheduled wedding, Lamarat is sent to find him. He enlists the help of local cab driver Chalid, whose running internal commentary functions as a Greek chorus to the drama unfolding in Iwojen. After Mosa is finally rounded up, Rebekka stages a "wedding" of her own in a violent confrontation that has elements of ritual sacrifice. Benali perfectly captures the shaky ground on which memory stands: Lamarat dreams of the North African life he might have lived as a Parcheesi champion; his father sends money to build a dream house that turns out to be rapidly falling into ruin, much like the family itself. Episodes of exile, family betrayal and violent catharsis are spiced with elements of magical realism. Lamarat can hear his unborn sister talking to him from the womb, saying "Lamarat, you little twerp, are you out there, can you hear me?" Benali's habit of interweaving songs with dialogue and narrative causes some confusion, but despite occasional difficulties in comprehension, the novel offers a colorful look at North African life and a playful appreciation of the backward-looking dreams of immigrants everywhere.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This debut by Moroccan-born Dutch writer Benali is the story of Lamarat Minar!s hunt for his drunken Uncle Mosa, who skipped out on his own wedding to visit his favorite whorehouse. With the help of a comical taxi driver, Lamarat retrieves Mosa and delivers him to the waiting bride, who takes immediate revenge for his philandering by turning their wedding into a bloody affair by the sea. Earthy, ribald, and humorous, this is a light, breezy tale for which the author won many highly placed literary prizes in Europe. One chapter near the end of the novel, Recipes for Love, serves as a cooking lesson for a happy marriage. In it, the author instructs us to Take a village located on good, salty seawater and pour in half a cup each of a man and a woman. Add a layer of holy matrimony of the first pressing, letting the oil simmer slowly...add the guests. Recommended for public and academic libraries with readers interested in watching a writer of promise begin his literary career."Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (June 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559705302
• ISBN-13: 978-1559705301
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,076,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And what a strange, spicy and hilarious wedding it is..., June 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Wedding By the Sea (Hardcover)

I was surprised to learn that the North African/Dutch author was so young--wrote this book around the age of only 20. Aside from that, I loved the story: the rambling, lyrical, sometimes hallucinatory oral tale telling style really captivated me. The cultural references are refreshingly messy windows into the world of a culturally mixed hero. So many of us have a wildly mixed family culture. It's a fun read and well-written novel. I am looking forward to his next.

3.0 out of 5 stars Moments of hilarity are worth the wait, February 1, 2005

By 

Alanna Kellogg "AK" (St. Louis) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wedding By the Sea (Hardcover)

I found the rambling style a slog ... until realizing it was just like a spirited conversation with lots of asides and back stories. Despite the where-did-that-come-from conclusion, the story-telling along the way is quite something!

4.0 out of 5 stars A modern Arabic storyteller, November 30, 2003

By 

Linda Oskam "dutch-traveller" (Amsterdam Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wedding By the Sea (Hardcover)

Lamarat is a Moroccan boy who is born and raised in Holland. He travels with his parents to Morocco, which is more or less unknown to him, for the wedding of his sister Rebekka with his uncle Mosa. The only problem is that Mosa loves women too much and that he tries to escape his own wedding. Lamarat gets the order to find his uncle (and future brother in law) from his panicked father: the wedding guests who are inside eating the wedding meal while sitting on garden chairs imported from Holland should not know anything about this event. In the end he finds his uncle and nearly returns him in one piece, until fate intervenes...

This is Abdelkader Benali's first novel and he certainly shows that he can write. He remains true to his North-African roots and shows that he is a modern storyteller: the story mentioned above forms the backbone of the book but there are numerous digressions describing the way the parents met, their constant longing for Morocco, the house they build that starts to fall apart from the beginning, Lamarat who is a strange in a land that should be his, the double standards with regard to male and female pre-marital sex and the determination of Rebekka.