The sand child

Book Review by: educaweb

Original Author: Tahar Ben Jelloun

Summary rating: 5 stars (3 Ratings)
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Tahar Ben Jelloun is a wizard, a blacksmith, a griot holder of the capacity of these snake charmers, or listeners,

who made formerly the magic of the place Jamaa El Fna, and who appeared regularly, accurately, at a fixed place of all the village souks.
the reader is transported as of the first pages on the Persian carpet, Eastern, Moroccan.
the history of Ahmed, that her father called of this name of man by shame to have had before him seven girls, is the account initially intimate, tearing, heavy, of a secret history of family. Only the parents, the obstretician, then the interested party (E), know that Ahmed is the eighth girl.
the novel is not linear, remains unfinished, comprises zones of shade, is with several voices, several narrators who contradict themselves, or are supplemented, perhaps (with the reader to choose, imagine, fill the vacuums), with the manner, precisely, from these interminable accounts which run of place in place, of storyteller as a storyteller, enjolivés, exaggerated, personalized by the phantasms of each teller, like Thousand and One Nights of which each tale would have been composed by a different personality.
It I of narrators, alleged pilot, or heirs to book newspaper to Ahmed, mingles with that with character, versions intersect, intermingle, in play erudite, labyrinthian, mirrors, roads, places geographical or literary, where narrator author finishes by to lose itself, voluntarily, with delight, until to identify with at least another large author, that one recognizes as being Jorge Shine Borges, of which to zahir it appears abruptly in wire of an increasingly muddled history, which is diluted in sands of the desert, i.e. the intertexte.
One understands that Clézio, itself storyteller of sands and the deserts, liked this novel which does not have end, and which has all the ends: « Tahar Ben Jelloun can retain us at the edge of the sleep by some possible bounce that it will make wait until the morning, especially that with the end there is the Secrecy, a Golden Fleece, which is the reward of the reader and the gift of the scribe… ».
Each one to discover his own secrecy there.