2 out of 4 stars
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Some years ago I translated a statement delivered at a meeting on religious tolerance in which the representative of Morocco mentioned his country’s Jewish minority, now dwindling into non-existence. This story is, at least in part, told from the point of view of a Sephardic Jew, descended from those who were expelled from Spain in 1492.
In The Expelled by Mois Bennarroch, a middle-aged man arriving in Jerusalem on a bus from Tel Aviv meets a woman who not only resembles a younger version of his wife. He knows immediately that she actually is the same woman (indeed she is “more than her”) aged 25. His knowledge of her name, that she speaks French and how she prefers her coffee leads her to regard him as “one of those maniacs stalking people”. The much-vaunted repetition of this phrase is presumably an attempt to be funny, although stalking maniacs are not funny. Yet, perhaps because he is her future husband, she proceeds to take him to her house where a scene ensues that reads like pulp pornography or masturbatory fantasy.
Luckily, when the narrator returns to Gabrielle the younger’s house the following afternoon, she declares that there will be no sex today, only literature. He reads her his short novel, which is a story about somebody telling a story about a shooting on a bus driving from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. The passengers quickly divide into the “front people” who dominate and persecute the “back people”. The bus is diverted onto a deserted road and passes through ever-changing landscapes, and the narrative veers through many switches of narrator and perspective.
So this is a work of magic realism and metafiction; to call it science fiction seems something of a stretch. It was interesting to read something with an alternative structure and ever-changing viewpoints, which the author handles well. He braves introducing multiple characters by depicting many of the bus passengers only briefly; I was amazed that that worked, but somehow, it did.
The essence of the story is reflected in what amounts to an essay at its heart about the identity and experiences of discrimination in Israel of a Sephardic Jew originally from Morocco. Despite speaking three European languages he is considered an “Easterner” by those who speak a Semitic language, and says: “I like that, contradictions, paradoxes, a world in which logic doesn’t explain anything, the moment when the one who believes he is logical loses track and is confronted with something that cannot be logical”.
Central to the work though paradox is, the author does not consistently seem to use illogicality deliberately for effect, but rather seems to make mistakes sometimes. For example, the younger Gabrielle says she got his phone number by calling herself on his cell phone while he was in the bathroom at the bus station, although we were previously told that he made a phone call while in the bathroom. Nothing in the text indicates that this logic fail is deliberate, and it has no added value.
In addition to a narrative that includes diversions that lead to dead ends, the prose is frequently clunky and stilted. Reading it feels like riding down a road pitted with potholes in a bus with poor suspension. This may be less problematic in the original language but the English version is what I had to review. In that connection, there are multiple errors of English grammar and usage from the outset and throughout. To cite just a few examples: “No kidding, if he had slept with so many women, then when would he had found the time to write all those poems and novels”; “Until the last moment, I found a mistake …”;“a woman stared at me, unable to shake her eyes off of me”; and “I am not left-winged enough”. That last one was good for a laugh, at least. Owing to these shortcomings, my official rating for this book is two out of four stars.
If more nuanced ratings were possible, I would give it two point five stars because there are many gems and entertaining moments. There is something cheeky and charming about the different narrators and despite the sickening jolts of the language, something kept me riding that bus with them to find out how things pan out. That having been said, there is nothing unexpected about what the analogy stands for.
I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a quick, entertaining read or to anyone who would like to gain a different perspective on the Middle East and hear alternative voices. It is not for those who favour only conventional narrative structures, of course. I also would not recommend it to anyone who prefers smooth, grammatically correct English, and I hope that a future edition may be brought out in which the errors have been corrected.
Overall, a bumpy ride with the occasional great view.
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The Expelled
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