A country for dying

Abdellah Taïa, 1973-

Book - 2020

"Paris, summer of 2010. Zahira is a Moroccan prostitute late in her career whose generosity is her way of defying her humiliation and misery. Her friend Aziz, a male prostitute, admires her and emulates her. Aziz is transitioning from his past as a man into the womanhood of his future, and asks Zahira to help him choose a name for himself as a woman. Motjaba is an Iranian revolutionary, a refugee in Paris, a gay man fleeing his country at the end of his rope, who finds refuge for a few days with Zahira. And then there is Allal, Zahira's first love, who comes to Paris years later to save their love. The world of A Country for Dying is a world of dreamers, of lovers, for whom the price of dreaming is one they must pay with their fle...sh. Writes Taïa, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future.""--

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FICTION/Taia Abdellah
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Subjects
Genres
Transgender fiction
Romance fiction
Novels
Published
New York : Seven Stories Press 2020.
Language
English
French
Main Author
Abdellah Taïa, 1973- (author)
Other Authors
Emma Ramadan (translator)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
136 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781609809904
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Immigrants in Paris seek political, economic, and sexual refuge in Taïa's heart-wrenching tale of postcolonial identity crisis (after Infidels). Zahira, a 45-year-old prostitute, is haunted by memories of her father's suicide in Morocco when she was a child, and of Allal, a possessive Moroccan who loved her decades earlier. In Paris, Zahira looks out for an Algerian protégé, Zannouba, on the eve of Zannouba's sex reassignment surgery, and Mojtaba, a gay Iranian dissident, whose innocence awakens Zahira's maternal instincts. For Zahira and others, solace eludes them in the form of lost or unrequited love, a theme Taïa distills in a nested story of Zahira's vanished aunt, Zineb. Enlisted by the French to service soldiers in 1950s Indochina, Zineb is left adrift between the family she's left behind and a love she can only sell. Taïa's blunt style is shot through with an immediacy accenting the high stakes for those chased across borders and running from their own pasts ("You thought you had fled our world," says Allal). But Zahira is not free, and Allal has not forgotten her; he is coming now to Paris, planning to kill her. In the churning gears of this compact, deeply moving novel, crises of identity prove more solvable than those of the heart. (May)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In this newly translated work of fiction, the Paris-based Moroccan writer and filmmaker looks at sexuality, desire, and identity in a post-colonial world. Zahira is a Moroccan woman living in Paris. She gives her friend Aziz, an émigré from Algeria, the new name Zannouba on the evening before the young woman's gender affirmation surgery. Both are prostitutes. Zahira offers herself to the Muslim immigrants of Paris. Zannouba cultivates a wealthier clientele. Both women dream of a future that is very different from their present, and their accounts are intertwined with those of the men and women they meet. The people depicted here are not so much united by story--there isn't much in the way of story--as by themes. The French occupations of North African and Southeast Asia cast a shadow over their lives, from the undocumented laborers Zahira takes as customers to another Moroccan prostitute attached to a French army unit in 1950s Saigon. Class and race are also explored here. A man who fell in love with Zahira when she was a girl is enraged to discover that she is not the pure creature he imagined, and his anger is fueled, in part, by the fact that her mother rejected his offer of marriage because he's Black. When Zannouba first arrives in Paris, she makes her way by presenting herself in the way French men want to see her: "I prostituted myself dressed as a moderately savage Arab boy from over there, Algeria. The clients liked that." In her private life, she simultaneously emulates and disdains the wealthy, educated men in her orbit. Identity is presented as a fluid concept for the characters. Upon discovering that surgery is not the transformation she hoped it would be, Zannouba loses herself in a surreal reverie about the actress Isabelle Adjani. Another actress--the classic Bollywood star Nargis--is an aspirational figure for the Moroccan woman stranded in Vietnam. None of these characters emerges as a fully formed person, and they all speak with the same fervent, poetic voice. But in these vignettes and monologues, Taïa offers American readers glimpses of lives few of us are likely to see outside of this book. Lyrical and impassioned. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.