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arnovanvlierberghe's review against another edition
4.0
"Onze helden waren grote krachtpatsers met platvloerse bijnamen uit een volksliteratuur van likmevestje, die met elkaar op de vuist gingen tussen hun immer gedenkwaardige zuippartijen door, voordat ze hun toevlucht zochten tot koloniale bordelen en dromen waarin hun vochtige blik geen onderscheid meer kon maken tussen engelen en hoeren met voorgevels vol bankbiljetten van tienduizend, engelen ontsnapt uit een wreed paradijs en tweederangs hoeren die onder hun voddige kleren nauwelijks hun arme pijnlijke lichaam konden verbergen, gekneed door generaties soldaten uit het vreemdelingenlegioen, dronken matrozen, uitgehongerde bedoeïen en jongemannen op ontdekkingstocht, weggelopen van het bioscoopscherm of uit de vagevuurmoskee."
stusahn's review against another edition
5.0
Dream-like and hallucinatory, as if the jinn al-ashiq, the woman with long black hair Bouanani describes on pg. 91 who morphs into the image of one’s beloved, is actually the angel of death omnipresent within the confines of the labyrinth hospital complex’s iron gates… haunting not the terminally ill but the mythos of precolonial morocco, its saints, flora and fauna, its popular poetics. What is left are but fragments of a desecrated memory.
pearloz's review against another edition
A very disorienting novel--at first I thought Hospital was a euphemism for...purgatory? Everyone in the hospital seemed to fit a purgatorial trope: two old timers fighting and commenting, the one who should be there, the young one who has been there longer than anyone can know. By the end of the book, I was no less convinced that it wasn't a purgatory: "Remember the gate where we came in? I've been trying to find it for years!"
In between, the narrator/main drifts between interactions with other internees and nurses and his dreams and nightmares. It was difficult to discern reality from dreamscape in this book, and it made it feel all the more ethereal and subsequently difficult to grasp; I just couldn't get a hold of this book. Is this a hospital? A mental hospital, right? But people seem to die frequently? And what of the various wards? How long has everyone actually been here? Why did they say there's only one way to leave? It is presumed that that way is death...but is there any attempt to help or cure? Are they really held here? Or are they here of their own volition?
Near the end, we get a succinct synopsis direct from a trope-disguised-as-a-character, the "crazy guy who was a moment of clarity the illuminates the whole world" who goes by the name Fartface:
"It's undoubtedly not too late for me to make up my mind, for a second or so. I think you've understood for a while now that the idea of duration is entirely unpredictable here. I don't mean to say that time doesn't exist, that it flows through people on the outside, aging them a little more each second. It's probably even more present within these high walls surrounding us, so denase and cramped that we can touch it. That's what's so terrible. We have the ability to touch time the way you'd touch a consenting thigh. But despite that calculated, automated repetition, day and night, under the sun and moon, we're possessed by the horrible certitude that the same day, and the same night are alternating with all the fidelity of a nightmare. I mean, yes -of course!- a flood of small details emerges to make us believe that something's changed, details so necessary that I'm absolutely certain we would all be mad without them. We've been in this hospital -let's call it that since, in a away, we are being treated here- for years. I can't count the days because their deceptive number has in fact been reduced to a single day that lasts 'inside' of each of us, and that day is a single point that can contain the entire universe, infinity. For all intents and purposes, it's pretty much like the word that, according to the theologians, encompasses God, a word that is of course impossible to find, and that an eternity wouldn't suffice to discover. Everyone who's come here -and you're one of many- has confused that permanence with boredom."
I mean...yeah, but also, huh?
In between, the narrator/main drifts between interactions with other internees and nurses and his dreams and nightmares. It was difficult to discern reality from dreamscape in this book, and it made it feel all the more ethereal and subsequently difficult to grasp; I just couldn't get a hold of this book. Is this a hospital? A mental hospital, right? But people seem to die frequently? And what of the various wards? How long has everyone actually been here? Why did they say there's only one way to leave? It is presumed that that way is death...but is there any attempt to help or cure? Are they really held here? Or are they here of their own volition?
Near the end, we get a succinct synopsis direct from a trope-disguised-as-a-character, the "crazy guy who was a moment of clarity the illuminates the whole world" who goes by the name Fartface:
"It's undoubtedly not too late for me to make up my mind, for a second or so. I think you've understood for a while now that the idea of duration is entirely unpredictable here. I don't mean to say that time doesn't exist, that it flows through people on the outside, aging them a little more each second. It's probably even more present within these high walls surrounding us, so denase and cramped that we can touch it. That's what's so terrible. We have the ability to touch time the way you'd touch a consenting thigh. But despite that calculated, automated repetition, day and night, under the sun and moon, we're possessed by the horrible certitude that the same day, and the same night are alternating with all the fidelity of a nightmare. I mean, yes -of course!- a flood of small details emerges to make us believe that something's changed, details so necessary that I'm absolutely certain we would all be mad without them. We've been in this hospital -let's call it that since, in a away, we are being treated here- for years. I can't count the days because their deceptive number has in fact been reduced to a single day that lasts 'inside' of each of us, and that day is a single point that can contain the entire universe, infinity. For all intents and purposes, it's pretty much like the word that, according to the theologians, encompasses God, a word that is of course impossible to find, and that an eternity wouldn't suffice to discover. Everyone who's come here -and you're one of many- has confused that permanence with boredom."
I mean...yeah, but also, huh?
zral_noim's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
librosdesarahi's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
3.5
yavin_iv's review
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
nghia's review against another edition
2.0
“There’s only one hell, the true one, and it’s where we spend all our days — here. It’s right here!”
This Moroccan book, originally published in 1989, is an example of something that loses a lot in translation because most readers-in-English are missing a lot of context. (Moroccan history of the 1970s and 1980s isn't exactly a frequent topic.)
On the surface level, this is fairly straightforward: a man gets admitted to a hospital for some never-actually-discussed chronic disease. He eventually gains a kind of friendship with his fellow chronic patients. There's lots of implications about whether the hospital -- with its unvarying life, its narrow grounds, its lack of visitors -- is a kind of prison, or perhaps even some kind of purgatory-like afterlife.
“Do you remember the big iron gate that you walked through the day you arrived?”
“Of course.”
“Have you seen it since?”
“Uh . . .” (I felt a sort of emptiness in the pit of my stomach).
“Have you tried to find it again?”
This take won't exactly be new to, uh, anyone. Though The Hospital goes in a very different direction from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (there are no sadistic nurses, here the focus is on the patients) it isn't exactly new ground. And "terminal patients in hospital" also has gotten a fair amount of play. (Many years ago I read a book about children in a cancer ward, all with terminal diagnoses, whose name I've completely forgotten. I thought it was maybe by [a:Amélie Nothomb|40416|Amélie Nothomb|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1457300466p2/40416.jpg] but that doesn't seem to be right. It had similar themes of ennui, repetitiveness, etc.)
We’ve been in this hospital — let’s call it that since, in a way, we are being treated here — for years.
Despite one small theme (which I'll get back to in a second), I found The Hospital mostly a disappointment. Yes, the whole thing is that they're all trapped in the hospital and there's nothing to do. So this isn't exactly a book chocked full of plot. But none of the characters are especially compelling. The narrator, in particular, keeps himself nearly a complete mystery. But that void isn't filled with any of the other characters.
Thankfully the superfluous and quasi-absurd pretension that I am surrounded by animalistic humans has evaporated, leaving behind nothing but a bitter humility, full of confusion and silence.
The one sort of nice theme is that the narrator starts out the book mostly looking down on everyone else. They are uncouth, illiterate, probably liars. At best, they are just fodder for his future books. But eventually, without any big dramatic turns, they've all become (kind of) friends, sitting around all day, trying to keep one another entertained. (Especially in this time before Netflix and mobile phones imagine the challenge that would have presented!)
When I read the translator's note at the end, I realized how some extra context about Morocco during that time period might have helped me enjoy the book somewhat more (and explain its reputation). Smallish throwaway lines and scenes turn out to be (fairly oblique) references to the dictatorship, to censorship, and so on. Basically all of which went completely over my head while reading it.
Looking back, even armed with that knowledge, I'm still not sure I'd have liked this much more, though.
mintealexi's review against another edition
1.0
1.5 stars
This book brought up private parts too many times to count. Most of it seemed overly weird for no reason. I get it was meant to be weird, but a lot seemed over the top and had no purpose. An experience for sure.
This book brought up private parts too many times to count. Most of it seemed overly weird for no reason. I get it was meant to be weird, but a lot seemed over the top and had no purpose. An experience for sure.
lauren_endnotes's review against another edition
5.0
"I rub shoulders with death every day, that's why I no longer fear him. I see him in the eyes of my companions, dressed like them in squalid blue pajamas, smoking crappy tobacco like everyone else, shooting the shit while waiting for dusk."
~From THE HOSPITAL by Ahmed Bouanani, translated from the French (Morocco) by Lara Vergnaud, 1990 original /2018 English from New Directions @ndpublishing
A fire destroyed Bouanani's apartment in 2006. Devastated by the loss of work, his wife sifted through the ashes and water damaged materials. She found a few pieces still in tact - L'Hôpital/The Hospital, some unpublished/unfinished works, and a copy of Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph amongst them.
The story of how this amazing work came to be published is just as great as the piece itself - involving cross-referencing/cross Atlantic detective work, and the translator's work with Bouanani's eldest daughter, Touda, an artist and filmmaker who performs drag as Fernando Pessoa, and is caretaker of her late father's remaining work in film and print. Bringing this manuscript, and his poetry collection The Shutters to translation and print by New Directions in 2018 is a cinematic story itself!
The Hospital is brilliant, funny, philosophical, and fractured. A fictionalized tale of Bouanani's own hospitalization for tuberculosis, our unnamed narrator describes the other patients in his ward, their antics, conversations - both humorous and gross - but also hallucinatory. Is this really happening? Is this a fever dream?
Part Kafka, part One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, part Irvine Welsh gritty/gross. Brilliant translation of colloquial phrasing and dialect. A marvel to read - I'll share some more quotes below...
I'm no lawyer, but i say you have to know how to read between the lines of the law. Only idiots interpret it literally, idiots and honest people, which is the same difference. When they say 'society is well designed, you should always ask yourself: for whom?'"
Good God, what the hell am I doing here? It's the thousandth time I've asked myself this question, like some idle traveler who's visiting a place where boredom very quickly becomes insufferable.
Time during childhood is so uncertain. Later I learned that time was an adult invention, used to delineate the traps in which we struggle like small insects, or giants broken between heaven and earth.
The air in this place facilitates the growth of bizarre fungi in the imagination. At all hours I am caught between vertigo and delirium. Every day I feel my memory heal over it's scabs...
~From THE HOSPITAL by Ahmed Bouanani, translated from the French (Morocco) by Lara Vergnaud, 1990 original /2018 English from New Directions @ndpublishing
A fire destroyed Bouanani's apartment in 2006. Devastated by the loss of work, his wife sifted through the ashes and water damaged materials. She found a few pieces still in tact - L'Hôpital/The Hospital, some unpublished/unfinished works, and a copy of Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph amongst them.
The story of how this amazing work came to be published is just as great as the piece itself - involving cross-referencing/cross Atlantic detective work, and the translator's work with Bouanani's eldest daughter, Touda, an artist and filmmaker who performs drag as Fernando Pessoa, and is caretaker of her late father's remaining work in film and print. Bringing this manuscript, and his poetry collection The Shutters to translation and print by New Directions in 2018 is a cinematic story itself!
The Hospital is brilliant, funny, philosophical, and fractured. A fictionalized tale of Bouanani's own hospitalization for tuberculosis, our unnamed narrator describes the other patients in his ward, their antics, conversations - both humorous and gross - but also hallucinatory. Is this really happening? Is this a fever dream?
Part Kafka, part One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, part Irvine Welsh gritty/gross. Brilliant translation of colloquial phrasing and dialect. A marvel to read - I'll share some more quotes below...
I'm no lawyer, but i say you have to know how to read between the lines of the law. Only idiots interpret it literally, idiots and honest people, which is the same difference. When they say 'society is well designed, you should always ask yourself: for whom?'"
Good God, what the hell am I doing here? It's the thousandth time I've asked myself this question, like some idle traveler who's visiting a place where boredom very quickly becomes insufferable.
Time during childhood is so uncertain. Later I learned that time was an adult invention, used to delineate the traps in which we struggle like small insects, or giants broken between heaven and earth.
The air in this place facilitates the growth of bizarre fungi in the imagination. At all hours I am caught between vertigo and delirium. Every day I feel my memory heal over it's scabs...
dvversendaal's review against another edition
4.0
Een mooi boek om te lezen in lockdown; opgesloten zijn gaat niet in je koude kleren zitten maar de illustere figuren in dit boek (de vrijbuiter, de ruft en de kegel om maar een paar te noemen) vinden troost bij elkaar in deze kliniek/inrichting of bajes.