The hospital A tale in black and white

Moroccan filmmaker and writer Bouanani's newly translated mind-bending 1990 work about secluded, chronically ill patients blurs lines between history, Islamic folklore, and nightmares. The unnamed narrator is admitted to a labyrinthine hospital for treatment of an unspecified disease. To survive the tedium of endless days and unexplained but gentle treatments, the narrator chronicles his slightly detached interactions with fellow patients. A timid young man known as Rover drifts through the hospital and into the narrator's nightmares. Another young patient, Guzzler, embellishes his thuggish exploits to cover up his vulnerabilities. The narrator increasingly loses his sense of reality, seeing himself in the afterlife and his own past and overhearing possibly imagined conversations. Moments of irreverent humor, such as old men debating whether medicine is permitted during their Ramadan fast, cut through the genuine terror of patients' sudden deaths and uncertain futures. An ample introduction by Anna Della Subin provides context on Bouanani's life and Moroccan history to help readers understand some of the allusions. The layers of metaphor and surreal imagery create a atmospheric, unresolved tension for fans of compressed, unsettling narratives. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

It would be hard to avoid the word "Kafkaesque" in describing this dreamlike and symbolic excursion into an institution that represents suffering humanity.Originally published in French in 1990 and now translated for the first time, this novel by Moroccan writer and filmmaker Bouanani (1938-2011) plunges the reader into a world of pain, misery, and mysterya world in which no one leaves the hospital because no one is ever cured. The patients are given nicknames that are both descriptive and evocative: Guzzler, Rover, Fartface. From the opening sentence"When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive"Bouanani introduces a world of confinement and a kind of death in life. The narrator admits to being a "great amnesiac," and much of the book is about the possibility of recovering his memory. He's observant of the present, however, and spends a great deal of time describing what he seeshis fellow patients as well as the hospital itself. Incongruously, amid the bleakness of the patients' lives, the hospital has a garden, ancient oaks, and profuse vegetation. Bouanani foregoes conventional narrative structure and instead presents his plot as a series of encounterssome brutish, some tenderbetween patients. The narrator uses the dreamlike aura of the hospital in a self-conscious way as he wonders for "the thousandth time" what he's doing there and questions whether his experience is "dream or reality"and he then aptly alludes to his earlier reading of Kafka and Borges. Nothing ever becomes quite clear in the narrator's experience but rather remains murkily allegorical. Whatever else it may be, the hospital is definitely a microcosm of suffering humanity: "Regardless of where I look, even in the depths of my sleep, I see nothing but men set upon by a decay greater than ever before. It's not just disease wearing them down."A puzzling but haunting novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.