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Thursday 31 October 2013

The Write Advice 039: DEBORAH EISENBERG


Of course, there are ancillary advantages to writing fiction. You get to leave your body, for instance, so you can have experiences that a person with your physical characteristics couldn’t actually have.
      I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we’re rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that’s inside of you.  It seems so ridiculous.  Why can’t I just buckle on my sword and leap on my horse and go charging through the forests?
      But the real fun of writing, for me at least, is the experience of making a set of givens yield.  There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression.  You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate.  But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent.  You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down.  When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.
 

The Art of Fiction #218  [The Paris Review #204, Spring 2013)

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of North American writer and actor DEBORAH EISENBERG:

 

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2009/deborah-eisenberg

 


 

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The Write Advice 029: ANNIE PROULX

 
The Write Advice 027: TAHAR BEN JELLOUN

 
The Write Advice 024: JERZY KOSINSKI

Thursday 24 October 2013

J is for Jazz 008: KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA


KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA
c 1965





The one, and the most important artist of 1960s Polish jazz, was Krzysztof Komeda.  His rolecannot be explained in merely a few sentences.  Words like: genius, composer, visionary, collaborator and leader cannot fully describe him. How could this talented but not by any means virtuoso pianist with a medical degree make such a great impact?  How could all of the musicians who played with him emphasize what an overwhelming impact his music and his personality made on them?




 
 
 
Post-World War Two Poland may seem an unlikely place for jazz to have flourished, let alone to have produced one of its most internationally acclaimed (not to mention widely influential) superstars.  The fact that Krzysztof Komeda –– who was born Krzysztof Trzcinski in the central western Polish city of Poznan on 27 April 1931 – began his career as a so-called 'amateur musician,' playing popular tunes in dance bands as a weekend hobby, only makes his achievements in the jazz realm that much more astonishing.  By the time he died in April 1969 Komeda had become the leading figure in the rapidly evolving European jazz movement –– a pianist and bandleader whose alternative career as the composer/arranger and performer of evocative, jazz-tinged soundtracks for iconic 1960s Polish films like Innocent Sorcerers (1960, directed by Andrzej Wajda) and Knife In The Water (1962, directed by Roman Polanski) served as a touchstone for his contemporaries and has remained so for later generations of Polish and international musicians alike.
 
 



MOJA BALLADA [MY BALLAD] (1960)
KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA QUARTET



 
 
Trzcinski spent his formative years in the southern central Polish cities of Czestochowa and Ostrow Wielkopolski.  He began to study piano as a child and was admitted to the Poznan Conservatory in 1939, from where it was hoped he would go on to pursue a career as a concert pianist.  Unfortunately, the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in September of that year quickly put an end to this dream.  Although he retained a lifelong fondness for classical compositions – particularly for the compositions of Bach and Chopin –– Trzcinski was destined to make his mark playing a very different yet equally challenging style of music.

 
After graduating from high school in 1950, where he had been a keen member of the Music and Poetry Club, Trzcinski entered the Poznan Medical Academy, eventually going on to specialize in otolaryngology (better known today as 'ENT' or 'Ear, Nose and Throat' medicine).  While still at high school he had met Witold Kujawski, already a well-known bass player who had become a leader of a new movement which dedicated itself to playing the officially frowned upon 'decadent Western music' better known as jazz.  It was Kujawski who served as his guide to this forbidden 'new' style of music and first took him to Krakow where a tiny underground jazz scene was emerging in deliberate and often dangerous defiance of Poland's rigid new Soviet-backed government.  Banned from playing in public, this was a period –– documented so brilliantly by filmmakers like Wajda and Janusz Morgenstern – when it was only feasible for jazz musicians to perform in private homes for small gatherings of trusted, hand-picked friends.  It was at one of these same informal music parties, held in the tiny Krakow apartment of Kujawski, that Trzcinski performed this threatening foreign music for the first time with some of Poland's leading jazz musicians, including soprano saxophonist Jerzy Matuszkiewicz.  Fearful that his reputation as a physician might be compromised if he performed under his real name, he also adopted the pseudonym 'Komeda' – a childhood nickname –– at this time and continued to use it for the rest of his all too brief career.
 
 



ROZMOWY JAZZOWE
A short Polish film (12 minutes) featuring 
live performances by
HOT CLUB MELOMANI and
KOMEDA SEXTET



 
 
Between 1951 and 1956 Komeda performed as a member of the Dixieland band Hot Club Melomani, which also featured Kujawski on bass, and in the dance band of Jerzy Grzewinski which, in time, also chose to follow the Dixieland path as the government's oppositional attitude to jazz finally began to soften.  A more tolerant attitude on the part of the Polish Communist Party resulted, in August 1956, in Grzewinski's band being invited to play at Poland's first-ever State-approved jazz festival in the northern city of Sopot.  The band created a sensation but Komeda, who had already fallen under the spell of the 'modern' sound of new North American groups like the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, stole the show with his own Sextet featuring saxophonist Jan Ptaszyn Wroblewski and vibraphonist Jerzy Milian.  

 
Komeda's festival success turned him into a full-time bandleader, one whose moody and sometimes discordant original compositions soon attracted the attention of talented graduates of the Polish Film School like Roman Polanski who, in 1958, asked him to compose the score for his first surviving short film Two Men and A Wardrobe.  Other film work quickly followed, with both Andrzej Wajda –– at that time Poland's most famous and internationally renowned director –– and Janusz Morgenstern asking him to compose soundtracks for their films Innocent Sorcerers (1960) and See You Tomorrow (1960).  In 1968, with his credentials as a composer now firmly established, Komeda created what was perhaps his most evocative and menacing soundtrack for Polanski's debut Hollywood feature Rosemary's Baby.  Film work also allowed him to explore the more experimental side of his nature and led, indirectly, to the composition and recording of his 1962 semi-classical piece Ballet Etudes.  Amazingly, Komeda found time to compose soundtracks for close to seventy films during the decade he was active in this field.

 
The early 1960s saw Komeda continue to consolidate his position as Poland's leading jazz musician with further festival appearances and tours to Scandinavia, Russia and France.  His first Scandinavian tour, which saw him and a new multinational band made up of Polish and Danish musicians impress audiences at Stockholm's Golden Circle Club and Copenhagen's Montmartre Club, also allowed him to make his first non-Polish recordings for the Swedish label Metronome.  He also participated in Jazz and Poetry, a widely watched TV program which featured his originally composed accompaniments to the work of State approved, Nobel Prize winning poets Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz and others.

 
In 1965 the pianist formed what is now considered to be his greatest, most groundbreaking band.  Known simply as the Komeda Quintet, the group featured future fellow Polish jazz icon Tomasz Stanko on trumpet, Zbigniew Namyslowski on alto saxophone and Danish musicians Guenter Lenz and Rune Carlsson on bass and drums respectively.  It was with this line-up that he recorded the album Astigmatic later that year –– a work described by English critic Stuart Nicholson as '…a bellwether for European jazzwith the emergence of a specific European aesthetic.  In terms of structure (ad hoc song forms that had a lot to do with Komeda's film writing), its improvisational and rhythmic approach, Astigmatic represents a fresh approach and a different way of hearing and playing jazz.'  Unfortunately, the Komeda Quintet only recorded one more album –– Lirik und Jazz, for the German label Electrola, in 1967 – prior to the 1968 accident which plunged the pianist into the coma that would eventually lead to his death at the age of thirty-seven.
 
 


DAYTIME NIGHTTIME REQUIEM
(aka REQUIEM FOR JOHN COLTRANE)
KOMEDA QUARTET
KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA (piano); TOMASZ STANKO (trumpet);
ROMAN DYLAG (bass); RUNE CARLSSON (drums)
TV performance 1967



 
 
The precise circumstances of the accident which robbed Komeda of his life at such a young age remain shrouded in mystery to this very day.  Some believe he suffered his fatal brain injury in a car crash, others that he sustained the injury after being pushed off an escarpment during a Hollywood drinking party –– he'd gone to Los Angeles in early 1968 to work with Polanski on the score for Rosemary's Baby –– by Polish writer Marek Hlasko, others still that he stumbled and fell while hiking in the Hollywood Hills.  Whatever the cause, the result was tragically the same.  Comatose and paralyzed, Komeda was taken back to Warsaw by his wife where he died on 23 April 1969 without regaining consciousness.  His funeral at the city's Powazski Cemetery was attended not only by his friends, musical associates and fellow artists, but by hordes of grieving fans who, like them, regretted the untimely passing of a performer unanimously celebrated as being a rare, inspiring and supremely gifted musical genius.  

 
Perhaps his greatest memorial, beside the hours of provocative and intriguing music he left behind, was the Jazz Festival named in his honour in 1995 which continues to incorporate an International Composer's Competition designed to discover and promote emerging young talent.  This seems a fitting tribute to a musician whose career began in obscurity at small private parties in post-war Krakow and eventually came to epitomize everything that continues to make European and especially Polish jazz so consistently fascinating.
 
 



KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA
c 1967





 
 
Use the links below to read more about the life and work of KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA and read reviews of his music (in English) on the excellent jazz blog POLISH JAZZ:
 
 
 
 


 

 
 
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.


 

 

 

 

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J is for Jazz 003: ANDREW HILL

 


J is for Jazz 006: CHARLES MINGUS 


 
Poet of the Month 003: WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

 

 

 

 

Last updated 2 October 2021 § 

 

Friday 18 October 2013

Poet of the Month 010: ANONYMOUS

 
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
THE LOWEST TREES HAVE TOPS
 
 
 
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
    The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat;
Hairs cast their shadows, though they be but small,
    And bees have stings, although they be not great.
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs,
And love is love, in beggars and in kings.
 
 
The ermine hath the fairest skin on earth,
    Yet doth she choose the weasel for her peer;
The panther hath a sweet perfumed breath,
    Yet doth she suffer apes to draw her near.
No flower more fresh than is the damask rose,
Yet next her side the nettle often grows.
 
 
Where waters smooth'st run, deep'st are the fords,
    The dial stirs, though none perceive it move;
The fairest faith is in the sweetest words,
    The turtles sing not love, and yet they love.
True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak,
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.
 
 
 
 
Published 1602
 
 
 
 
 
 
Who wrote this poem?  No one can say with any certainty.  Yet it has has somehow survived more than four hundred years.  Ponder that fact now that you've read it and wonder, as I do, at the fickle nature of literary fame.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Thursday 17 October 2013

Au pays [A Palace in the Old Village] (2009) by TAHAR BEN JELLOUN



Folio France, 2009



 

La retraite!  Non, pas pour lui et surtout pas maintenant! C'était quoi cette histoire?  Qui l'avait inventée?  C'était comme si on lui signifiait qu'il était malade et qu'il ne pouvait plus être rentable pour la société.  Une maladie incurable, un disponsibilité pour un immense ennui.  C'était cela, une malédiction, même s'il savait que d'autres ouvriers l'attendaient avec impatience.  Lui, il ne l'avait jamais attendue et encore moins espérée.  Il n'y pensait pas.  Il voyait ses copains s'en aller et il apprenait ensuite que la mort les avait emportés.  La retraite c'était le début de la mort, le bout du tunnel où la mort se cachait.

 

 

Retirement!  No, not for him and especially not now!  It's what, this story?  Who invented it?  It was as if they had shown him he was sick and could no longer be a profitable contributor to society.  An incurable sickness, a leave of absence that led only to an immense boredom.  It was a curse, even if he knew of other workers who awaited it with impatience.  He had never waited for it and had hoped for it even less.  He didn't think of it.  He saw his mates run headlong towards it and then learned that death had claimed them.  Retirement was the beginning of death, the end of the tunnel where death hid itself.

 
Excerpts translated by  
BR





 

The Novel:  Mohamed (spelled with only a single 'M' in his case) is a factory worker, a Moroccan immigrant who fled his native land in 1960 and came to France in the hope of discovering a better life for himself and his family.  A devout Muslim, Mohamed is also a man of simple but steadfast habits.  He prays five times a day, works hard at his dull and physically demanding job and uncomplainingly endures the scorn of his French neighbours who view him –– indeed, all North African (or 'Maghrebi') immigrants –– as fundamentalist interlopers, unfit to occupy the meager portion of sacred French soil they occupy.  Mohamed's life is hard but he's sustained by his (non-fundamentalist) religion, his family (he is particularly fond of Nabile, the mentally impaired son of his sister whom he adopted and brought to France so the boy could receive an education), his annual holiday visits to Morocco and his dream of one day returning to le bled –– the arid interior region of his homeland where he was born and raised –– as a prosperous immigré whose decision to take his chances in the West was entirely justified by the success and prosperity he found there. 

 

Everything remains tolerable for Mohamed until, as a man in his sixties, he's forced to confront the unappealing prospect of retirement.  What will become of him if he can no longer do his job, rise at dawn and go off to work at the factory each day?  Close friends of his have retired or, rather, been made to retire, and their lives have fallen apart.  With nothing useful to do, no productive means of utilizing their sudden abundance of free time, they've turned to alcohol and prostitutes to fill the void, bankrupting themselves and destroying their families in the process.  'Lentraite,' as Mohamed calls it, is not a blessing, a longed-for release from a life of unremitting toil, but a curse, a disease, an inescapable catastrophe.  His job is more than his identity.  It's his only reason for remaining in a country which once welcomed foreign-born workers like him (when it needed them to help rebuild its struggling post-World War Two economy) but now, thanks to the fear-mongering of right wing politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen, has demonized him even as it has transformed his children into Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who mock him for not knowing how to read or speak their adopted language properly.

 

Even Mohamed's own familiar Parisian suburb of Yvelines becomes a sinister place to him, his neighbours' casual cruelties and anti-Islamic prejudices unfathomable, its billboards plastered with photographs of half-naked women put there by Satan, it seems, solely to lure him from the path of righteousness.  The turning point comes when Jamila, his eldest daughter, refuses to break off her engagement to an Italian, telling him that this is not Morocco, that she is French, not une Maghrebienne [a North African woman] and consequently has the right to make her own decisions and marry whomever she pleases.  When Mohamed expressly forbids her to marry a Christian, Jamila openly defies him, declaring her intention not to speak to him again until he comes to his senses.  For her father, who is not ordinarily a stubborn man, this is too much.  He tells his wife that he's returning to Morocco to build them 'une grande maison' [a large house] in the desert where the family can come and live once more in harmony as true Muslims, unaffected by their disillusioning immigrant experiences.

 

Mohamed carries out his plan, travelling to Morocco by train because his car has been destroyed by Muslim youths protesting the government's harsh new anti-immigration laws –– a loss for which he has not been compensated by his insurance company because riots are deemed to be 'acts of God' and are therefore not covered by his policy.  He finds the country of his birth very much changed since his last visit, with healthy young people begging on street corners and corruption thriving everywhere.  Undaunted, he travels on to le bled and eventually builds his dream house –– a huge ramshackle monstrosity, badly designed and poorly constructed by an Egyptian builder too obsessed with pleasing his dissatisfied wife to do the job properly.  The builder's financial gain is Mohamed's financial and spiritual loss.  His own wife arrives but, seeking to avoid the arguments that any criticism of his plan might incite, says nothing about the barely inhabitable state of the house.  In the meantime, Mohamed continues to cling to his private dream of the house as a place his children will be proud to visit, a 'palace' his unborn grandchildren will one day be happy to consider their home away from home.

 

So powerful does this illusion become that Mohamed soon finds himself losing touch with reality, imagining himself falling victim to 'une chose noire' [a black thing] which seeks not only to crush his dream but also to physically and emotionally destroy him in the process.  He resists it, installing himself in a chair facing the house which, from that point on, he steadfastly refuses to leave, taking neither exercise nor nourishment as he and it both sink gradually and ever more deeply into the burning desert sand.  His wife becomes so alarmed by his behavior that she returns to France to beg their children to visit him.  Mohamed's children, however, refuse to come to Morocco, dismissing their father's desire to have them function as a respectable family again as a symptom of what, in their thoroughly Westernized eyes, is his obviously rampant but thus far untreated insanity.  Mohamed remains in his chair, literally buried in sand up to his chest, a martyr to a dream he could never bring to fruition because, for him, it represented only waste, loss and death.  By returning 'au pays' [to his country] he learns only that he no longer has a country in the real sense of the term.  He is, in a sense, a double exile –– from the land of his birth and from the nation that's been glad to exploit his labour and have him pay taxes even as it has rejected, excluded and vilified him.

 

 

Penguin Books UK edition, 2009

 

 

The power of Au pays lies in the stripped down beauty of its prose and the universality of its subject matter.  The fact that Mohamed is a Muslim from North Africa, a devout and far from dangerous follower of Islam, ultimately has no bearing on who or what he is as a human being – decent, honest, charitable, hardworking, concerned about his childrens' futures and how being raised in France has gradually eroded the values he has fought so hard to foster in them.  Ben Jelloun tells his story in simple, straightforward language that is as easy to read as it is subtle, compassionate and moving.  Mohamed's tragedy is the all-too-common one of people being unwillingly transformed into anachronisms by the twin evils of economic expediency and 'adjusted market conditions,' a worker who can no longer work, a pious and humble man in an age where piety and humility are viewed as signs of weakness if not of outright madness.  He finds himself as so many people who are forced into retirement do –– with no further reason to exist after being stripped of his status as a tax-paying wage slave, so he modestly and courageously sets out to build himself a reason, literally, in the form of his own ramshackle 'palace' in the desert.  In doing this building his house, trying to make it a place his family can love and use to renew itself –– he could be from any country in the world, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or a Jew seeking to regain his self-respect, indeed his actual sense of self, via the only means available to somebody in his unpromising but all too common situation.

 

Au pays is also remarkable for the way it depicts the plight of what some social theorists now classify as 'economic refugees.'  Mohamed loved his native country and had no wish to leave it, yet realized that his chances of survival, of raising his family and giving it all the economic and social advantages he lacked as a boy and so dearly wants it to have, would be greatly improved if he emigrated to France.  The racism he encounters there is a direct result of his poverty and his need to overcome it, combined with the xenophobia that makes every Muslim a potential terrorist in the eyes of unthinking Westerners who need easily identifiable scapegoats at whose feet they can lay the blame for their nation's various social, racial and political ills.  I wish a few Australian politicians would read this novel.  If they did, they might begin to understand that very few (if any) refugees –– economic or otherwise –– become so by choice.  Perhaps it would inspire them to find a more humane solution to Australia's refugee problems than forcibly detaining potential asylum seekers on small Pacific islands for years on end in what can only be described as extremely inhumane if not barbaric conditions that lead to depression, self-harm and, in far too many cases, suicide.






TAHAR BEN JELLOUN, c 1985

 

 

 

The WriterTahar Ben Jelloun was born in the Moroccan city of Fes on 1 December 1944.  His family lived in the medina – its traditional medieval quarter – where his father worked as a spice merchant and later as a tailor in the souk [marketplace].  At the age of six Ben Jelloun was sent to a bilingual school where classes were taught in Arabic in the morning and French in the afternoon.  His later decision to write in his non-native language was not, he says, a deliberate one.  'Arabic was something I would never lose,' he once explained, 'and therefore it was not necessary to make an effort over it.  I thought, unconsciously, that I had to invest my energies in a foreign language.  It was almost a challenge, a stimulant.' 

 

In 1955 his family relocated to Tanger, where he completed the rest of his schooling and obtained his baccalauréat (the French equivalent of a high school diploma) from its lycée français.  This enabled him to attend Mohammed V University in Rabat, where he studied philosophy –– studies curtailed in 1965 after he took part in student demonstrations against King Hassan II, the nation's reigning monarch, and his allegedly democratic but actually ruthlessly repressive CIA-sponsored government.  For his participation in these protests Ben Jelloun and ninety-four other like-minded students were detained in a disciplinary camp run by the army, where they were forbidden to read, write or do anything but drill all day beneath the scorching Moroccan sun.  

 

Ben Jelloun was not released from the camp until January 1968, the same year his first piece of writing –– a poem composed in secret during his time as an officially unrecognized political prisoner – was published in the radical Moroccan literary magazine Souffles [Breaths]His first poetry collection, titled Hommes sous linceul de silence [Men Under a Shroud of Silence], was published in 1970, by which time he had earned his degree and was teaching philosophy at a lycée in Casablanca.  When his department was Arabized (that is, forced to teach its courses in Arabic rather than French) in 1971, he left Morocco for Paris where he enrolled at the Sorbonne.

 

By 1973 Ben Jelloun was writing regularly for the French newspaper Le Monde, contributing book reviews and articles including three groundbreaking pieces he wrote in 1975 which describe the pilgrimmage to Mecca –– about Islamic culture designed to be read by a specifically non-Muslim readership.  His first novel Harrouda appeared the same year, earning him praise from Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett and the admiration and friendship of playwright and fellow novelist Jean Genet.  During this time Ben Jelloun also obtained his PhD in social psychiatry and began to practice as a psychotherapist, concentrating on the problems –– sexual and emotional – experienced by France's predominantly male immigré population.  His work in this field formed the basis of his 1976 autobiography La plus haute des solitudes [The Highest of Solitudes] and would go on to inform and influence many of his finest novels from La Réclusion solitaire [Solitary Confinement, 1975] right up to Au pays [A Palace in the Old Village, 2009].

 

 

TAHAR BEN JELLOUN and his parents, 1988

 

 

His 1978 novel Moha le fou, Moha le sage [Moha the Fool, Moha the Wise] was banned in Morocco for its unflinching depiction of the brutality routinely meted out to opponents of Hassan II's thoroughly corrupt and repressive regime.  Ben Jelloun fought the ban, personally appealing to the Minister of the Interior to have it overturned, and the book was eventually published in Morocco, going on to become one of the most widely read books in the nation's history.  He courted similar controversy in 1984 when he published the essay Hospitalité française [French Hospitality] in which he unflinchingly exposed the racist attitudes shared by large numbers of native-born French people.  It was boycotted by some French bookstores and its first two pages were deleted, although a revised and corrected version eventually appeared in 1997 without provoking further incident.  

 

The publication of his 2000 novel Cette aveuglante absence de lumière [This Blinding Absence of Light], which tells the story of one of Hassan II's former soldiers who was arrested and imprisoned in 1971 for taking part in an unsuccessful coup against his government, once again made Ben Jelloun a controversial figure.  When the novel was published, the former prisoner (cited in the book as its co-author) published an article in a Moroccan newspaper, denying that he'd ever asked the novelist to tell his story.  Despite the negative publicity these allegations earned Ben Jelloun –– some journalists even went so far as to accuse him of stealing his co-author's memories, just as some had earlier accused him of being no more than an exoticist who wrote exclusively for a Western audience – this did not prevent the book from winning the 2004 IMPAC Prize (awarded to the best foreign book translated into English), just as earlier controversies failed to prevent him winning the 1987 Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award, for his novel La nuit sacrée [The Sacred Night]. 

 

 


TAHAR BEN JELLOUN, c 2009

 

 

The terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center in September 2001 prompted Ben Jelloun to undertake the daunting task of attempting to explain Islam to the West and vice versa.  Along with his work – novels, poetry, essays and plays –– he began lecturing regularly on Islam and Islamic-related subjects in schools and universities and published articles in many leading European newspapers calling for increased tolerance, cooperation and understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim communitiesHe returned to Morocco in 2006, living with his wife and four children in Tanger while serving as mentor to Edem, a young writer from Togo.  He returned to Paris in 2009, where he continued to serve on the committee of the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch.  Today Tahar Ben Jelloun is considered to be one of France's most important authors, a writer who has done more than anybody to help break down the invisible but previously impenetrable barriers which have always existed between its native-born and immigré artists.  His most recent novel Le Bonheur Conjugal [The Happy Marriage] was published by Gallimard in August 2012. 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a 2006 interview with TAHAR BEN JELLOUN published in the online archive of The Guardian:
 
 
 
 


 

 

An English edition of Au pays, translated by LINDA COVERDALE and titled A Palace in the Old Village, was published by Penguin Books in January 2011.  Many other novels by TAHAR BEN JELLOUN, included The Sacred Night and This Blinding Absence of Light, have also been published in English translation.  

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 23 September 2021 §