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A review by lauren_endnotes
The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun
THE SAND CHILD by Tahar Ben Jelloun, tr. from the French (Morocco) by Alan Sheridan, 1985/1987.
This novella is likely to be one of the oddest books I'll read in 2020. I finished it a few days ago and was at a loss how to talk about it. Still am. But I'll attempt...
A man has 7 daughters, and when his wife becomes pregnant once more, he decides that even if the child is a girl, he will raise the child as a boy. He swears his wife to secrecy and bribes a midwife, and when the 8th daughter is born, the plan begins... He even has an elaborate plan to fake the circumcision.
The child grows apart from the sisters and assumes the role of the junior patriarch, receiving more attention and education than any other sibling. The plot begins to unravel when puberty sets in.
Or does it?
This entire story is narratively nested in the story of a traveling bard /storyteller. He tells this story of the 8th daughter to a group in market square, and leaves the tale unfinished, so that others pick it up and take it in different directions - some disgustingly violent, some trippy, others more mundane. Similar to the salon-style "exquisite corpse" style storytelling, or an elaborate game of "telephone". The reader is left with a confusing and amorphous maze of possibilities of what actually happened to the 8th daughter.
There's an inherent queerness to the story that could probably be mined even further, but I was honestly trying to just figure out the structure and style, and how Sheridan was able to get this across in a translation of the original French!
If it isn't obvious enough from the description, there are heavy Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino vibes. Borges even makes a brief appearance in one of the extended stories as the 'blind librarian'.
Hard to completely recommend because I spent a good amount of the time trying to figure out what was going on
This novella is likely to be one of the oddest books I'll read in 2020. I finished it a few days ago and was at a loss how to talk about it. Still am. But I'll attempt...
A man has 7 daughters, and when his wife becomes pregnant once more, he decides that even if the child is a girl, he will raise the child as a boy. He swears his wife to secrecy and bribes a midwife, and when the 8th daughter is born, the plan begins... He even has an elaborate plan to fake the circumcision.
The child grows apart from the sisters and assumes the role of the junior patriarch, receiving more attention and education than any other sibling. The plot begins to unravel when puberty sets in.
Or does it?
This entire story is narratively nested in the story of a traveling bard /storyteller. He tells this story of the 8th daughter to a group in market square, and leaves the tale unfinished, so that others pick it up and take it in different directions - some disgustingly violent, some trippy, others more mundane. Similar to the salon-style "exquisite corpse" style storytelling, or an elaborate game of "telephone". The reader is left with a confusing and amorphous maze of possibilities of what actually happened to the 8th daughter.
There's an inherent queerness to the story that could probably be mined even further, but I was honestly trying to just figure out the structure and style, and how Sheridan was able to get this across in a translation of the original French!
If it isn't obvious enough from the description, there are heavy Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino vibes. Borges even makes a brief appearance in one of the extended stories as the 'blind librarian'.
Hard to completely recommend because I spent a good amount of the time trying to figure out what was going on