Review by Sgatev23 -- Keys to Tetouan by Mois Benarroch

[Sgatev23]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Keys to Tetouan" by Mois Benarroch.]

---

2 out of 4 stars

---

Share This Review

---

I am sitting patiently in a remote corner at Glasgow airport, waiting. I am more than halfway through Mois Benarroch’s novel, Keys to Tetouan. The story follows the Benzimra family tree and its branches stretching to different parts of the world, ever since 1860. It traces the family’s lineage down to their very roots, to the city of Tetouan, to their Jewish origins.

I try to focus on the book’s ending as much as I can, though all I can really think about right now is my own life. I am going home. For years I have been trekking the foreign lands of the world. I am aware that after all those years, besides my mother who is eagerly anticipating my return, there is no one waiting for me on the other side, home. The people from my past have either deserted, just like me, or are long dead. And while I’m waiting for my plane, I sense a familiar feeling slowly overwhelming me, the same feeling of anxiety I felt when I first left home, the same feeling of estrangement and ‘otherness’ most of the characters in the novel experience on departing from Tetouan.

The year is 1492. King Ferdinand of Spain issues a decree requiring all Jews to either convert to Catholicism or leave. Most of them convert, others leave. While many of them scatter around the world, a small group crosses the Strait of Gibraltar and settles down in Morocco.

We call this place Tetouan after the late Mois Benzimra that settled in this Mediterranean island exactly fifty years ago. He took fifty women that gave birth to four hundred and fifty children, and they in turn brought new women and men here and gave birth to five thousand descendants.

This we learn from one of the many narrators in Keys to Tetouan. I have no idea which one. I tell myself that, most probably, it’s not that important knowing the ‘who’, but the ‘what’ in this novel. But, now, as I am reaching the end, I find it extremely hard to connect the pieces of all those mini-narratives; those short, highly-personal, piquant vignettes related by different members of the Benzimra family, which constantly waver between the first- and third-person in search for their lost identity. And while I believe that this type of narrative best conforms to the overall fabric of the novel than any other, I am still cutting my hands on these shards of fragmented information, desperately trying to glue them together. Maybe they are just not meant to be glued. As far as I am familiar with Benarroch’s poetics from reading some of his other works (The Expelled, Gates to Tangier, The Immigrant’s Lament), he is often too fixed on analysing Jewish history and ethnicity to worry about the kind of trivia concerning structure and plot. Keys to Tetouan seems no exception.

"Read on," I urge myself. I am already on the plane and halfway home.

A few pages later, I read about these two brothers and their new scanner which can project any object’s past. The younger brother says to the older,

Why should I care about your key, what will we watch with it, things that happened five hundred years ago, why would we be interested in that, I want to watch my life, my life.

This obviously triggers some empathy on my side as I mentally visualise the Tetouanese Jewish diaspora. I recall the novel’s characters, their eternal motion, displaced forever, not belonging anywhere. Eventually, both brothers get hooked up and start now crying, now laughing at the past imparted by the key, the past of the Benzimra family of which they are also a part, the past that sums up the book itself.

As my plane starts descending, it is met by a worrying turbulence. Meanwhile, I am growing increasingly agitated and vexed not only by it, but also by the poor grammar, numberless syntactical incoherencies, and over page-long sentences, permeating Benarroch’s text ("on 1860," "anyplace," "merci," among many). It still seems more of a draft to me than a published book, and I wonder if there had been a professional editor at all assigned to review this work. A shame, really, because the content hides truly great potential. Then I read the penultimate page:

A man sits and writes, he uses an old computer.

Prologue (and a response to all of my critics): this book is ethnic … this book is Moroccan … this book is post-post-modern … this book is a book of protest, because it has a lot of butter in it … this book has a lot of grammar mistakes … this book is for Middle Eastern readers … this book is completely different from the next book.

And as I exit the airport I look around at the once familiar, though now exceedingly strange to me place I used to call home, and am once again entrapped in Benarroch’s notions of otherness. This feeling of relatedness at once consoles me and cheers me up, bringing a slight smile to my face. A well-deserved 2 out of 4.

******
Keys to Tetouan
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes

Like Sgatev23's review? Post a comment saying so!