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[Following is a volunteer review of "The Expelled" by Mois Benarroch.]

I recently finished reading The Expelled by Mois Benarroch. I hate to give any author a low rating, especially an award-winning author whom Amazon describes as “one of the most enigmatic figures in today’s literature” but I chose to give the book a 1 out of 4 stars. After looking online at reviews of Benarroch’s other novels, I was excited to get the opportunity to read from such an accomplished poet and author.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed from the get-go. For me, the storyline was too jumbled and all over the place whereas I prefer novels with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Also, the story read like a really long conversation you would have with a friend where they go on multiple tangents and you try to redirect them back to the conversation at hand but in this scenario, there is no way to stop it.

Filled with so many turns and changes, the writing felt less like complex literature and more like being trapped inside the mind of someone who couldn’t concentrate for more than a moment. At first the protagonist, a Jewish author and poet who considers himself “the expelled”, begins his story by describing his marriage to Gabrielle and his affair with the younger version of herself.

On his first of many tangents, the narrator tells the young version of Gabrielle a story he has written in Spanish. It was at this point that I had to stop reading to take notes on who was who and how they were interrelated, assuming they were at all. In this story, his main character, also a Jewish man from Morocco, starts describing the journey that he and the other passengers take on a bus together. I read the story about the bus as recognition about caste systems, front people vs back people, and the struggles of diversity as the various passengers told them.

Which was a story unto itself.

Thinking I was almost done with the bus story, another turn is created and the reader finds out that the central character of the narrator’s story is in a facility somewhere being interrogated. As if that weren’t confusing enough, the protagonist then takes out a book that a “back person” wrote and begins to read that to the interrogators. We are now three levels in: the narrator’s protagonist is now telling a story from another man’s journal. I must go back and forth between my notes and the story to keep the characters in order.

In the man’s journal, he talks about members of his small poetry group and gives them letters instead of their actual names. Tying back to the bus story, the man talks about how he and his poetry group are expelled. As the reader, I felt that nothing was gained by adding in that extra layer to the story. I would like to believe that Benarroch was eluding to the fact that all people, in one way or another, feel expelled. He could have just been having fun messing with the reader’s heads.

Then, just when you think it’s all going to end and we’re going to get back to the bus story, the reader is informed that the bus exploded and the poet’s protagonist is being held as a suspected terrorist. The next thing you know there is a woman telling her story about being raped, presumably by the protagonist, and about the trials she endured on the bus. Unfortunately, I feel like this part was added in last minute. It was rushed and had no direct link, minus the fact that she claims to have been on the bus, to any of the other stories that have been told thus far. Is she representing expulsion by being a woman or being raped and what does that have to do with all the other story lines?

Finally, the poet ends his story and Gabrielle tells him that she doesn’t understand Spanish but she likes to listen to it. After all that, she doesn’t understand Spanish. Realizing that the young Gabrielle is no different than the older version, he begins to go into a long speech about how he feels expelled and he plans to make a book, not a great book but one that will sell enough so that he can create his next work and all the details he just told are the book he is writing. At this point I almost wanted to give up but I read the novel to the end and had no more clarification as to what was going on.

I don’t want to say that the novel was completely bad, it wasn’t I just don’t think this type of writing is my personal style. On a positive note, the imagery that I could create in my mind based of Benarroch’s descriptions were vivid throughout each story. Many times, I felt like I was locked inside the mind of an artist with all his colors going here and there creating a mess until you can stand further back and appreciate that all those mad strokes painted a beautiful picture…just not one I would buy.

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The Expelled
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This novel sounds like an acquired taste and one I might avoid. There is more of Mois Benarroch's work up for review (I have recently chosen one) so hopefully those will fare better.