Endless fall A little chronicle

Moroccan novelist Leftah (1946--2008; Captain Ni'mat's Last Battle) reflects on the shock of witnessing a classmate's suicide in this fragmentary memoir. In the early 1960s, shortly after Morocco gained independence from France, Leftah's schoolmate, Khalid, leapt to his death over the railing outside their history classroom in the small, conservative village of Settat. Khalid left behind a note wishing happiness to his adulterous mother and his friend on the soccer team, whom Leftah speculates may have also been his lover. Leftah buttresses his memories of the incident with complementary episodes--his assault by police while protesting at the French embassy; the drowning death of a Settat criminal known as "El Rey"--that loop back to the tragedy in somewhat cryptic ways. He also takes his own motives into consideration, wondering whether his "little chronicle" is "an act of scavenging or, on the contrary, something aimed at saving from the forgotten the tragic destiny of a gorgeous young man." What emerges is a searching and poetic elegy for a life cut short. This slim volume packs a formidable punch. Agent: Pierre Astier, Astier-Pécher Film & Literary. (June)

As a high school student in 1960s Morocco, Leftah (1946--2008) witnessed a classmate's death by suicide. Upset by his Muslim community's judgmental, hypocritical commentary on the student, Leftah--who would later become a novelist and literary critic (Demoiselles of Numidia)--eventually wrote this memoir as a tribute that evokes strong, vibrant memories and offers insight into his classmate's experiences. The memoir is short but packed with nuanced observations in Leftah's distinctive, descriptive, flowery style. It sometimes reads as poetic prose; other times, it's a blunt narrative that opens a window for readers to see the author's emotions and mental state during the years (1992--2006) he worked on the book. The result is emotionally wrought and captivating, but the narrative flow is sometimes interrupted by memories that are tangentially related to the overall story; the threads of connection are often not clearly defined. There's also some obscure vocabulary that might have readers checking definitions on a regular basis. VERDICT This discourse on death, suicide, queerness, youth, and small-town bigotry is a recommended title, but it's best for readers comfortable with academic works.--Katy Duperry

Haunted by the suicide of a classmate decades prior, a Moroccan author offers an elegant "little chronicle" as a proper lament for the young man. In the 1960s (exact date not specified), the suicide of a popular high school junior shocked the small Moroccan town of Settat, "still nothing more than a tiny village dozing like a lizard under an unchanging blue, sunlit sky." Seemingly out of nowhere, Khalid left his history class, a brief suicide note scribbled on the desk, and jumped to his death over a fourth-floor railing into the courtyard below. For Leftah (1946-2008), who wrote 10 novels during his career, Khalid became a "sleeper of the valley," after a poem by Rimbaud. In brief, cryptic segments, the author attempts to establish a sequence to the events, emphasizing detail that has become excruciatingly seared in his memory: Khalid's right arm in a sling that day as they climbed the stairs to class; the history professor, "alcoholic, intemperate, and decadent Mr. Ciccion," who was chosen as the "messenger" for the laconic suicide note asking forgiveness of Khalid's mother and wishing "eternal happiness" to a fellow student; and the Arabic teacher at school, who became the dead boy's punishing "obituarist," condemning the suicide according to Koranic verses. Leftah is compassionate in his excavation of the horror surrounding Khalid's death, and he speculates about the boy's motive--perhaps a transgressive love for a beautiful fellow soccer player? The author makes these remnants of memory shine like talismans. "I linked these items and writings with scraps, diversions and ruptures, rage and love, to dissolve a rhetoric, a writing, a calligraphic shroud," he writes. The book was first published in France in 2008. A moving, startling, enigmatic work of memory and loss that feels as fresh as when it was written. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

THE LETTER * "Dear Monsieur Ciccion, Please ask my mother to forgive me. I wish Nabil eternal happiness." By the time Mr. Ciccion, his face white as a sheet and his hands trembling, would begin to read and try but fail to understand the meaning of the note, so clear, so limpid even in its reticence, the young man who had just written it would already be stretched out on the courtyard's clay ground. . . . Stretched out . . . beneath the clouds . . . Sweet scents don't tickle his nose; He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his chest Motionless . . . It is from memory and in memory of an unforgettable courtyard sleeper--a courtyard that, an instant before it received the celestial, splendid body's fall, was still dusty, and from that moment on became a princely court--that I begin and dedicate this "little chronicle." Which opens no holiday in my days. Pleasure or amusement, even less. No more than a quarter of an hour had passed between the moment when I climbed the staircase with him to reach the fourth-floor classroom where Mr. Ciccion had already started his history class--we were both late--and the moment when he became this sleeper in the bloodied courtyard; a smiling sleeper in the valley. Motionless . . . More than forty years later, I still see all the stages, the unstoppable sequences of this transmutation, unfurling so clearly before my eyes. Five. Five sequences. Each one thoroughly defined, each thoroughly distinct. Autonomous yet interdependent, as bound as the fingers on a hand. The contours of a drama, in a form already outlined before it bursts into the world, so clearly sketched that for a long time the idea of this little chronicle seemed to me a kind of profanation or attack. Against a face at once gymnast's and ballet dancer's, a face closed in on its own unsayable grace, its final and tragic beauty, its mortal perfection. A face with no need of chronicler, narrator, nor celebrant to challenge, in its pure immateriality, the perverse work of time and oblivion. SETTAT * At the time these events take place, the time of the facts reported in this little chronicle, Settat was still nothing more than a tiny village dozing like a lizard under an unchanging blue, sunlit sky. Two annual events startled it out of its lethargy: the faithful seasonal fires that lit up the nouallas , those thatch huts nestled on a hillside at the edge of town, which doggedly survived and rose from the ashes like phoenixes; then the unpredictable floods crashing out of Wadi Ben Moussa. A burgeoning story, still in its first stuttering, but already common knowledge and as condemned as adultery . . . A suicide . . . PARDONING GESTURE * Would it be right to treat her as an adulterous woman, responsible for her son's suicide? Khalid's mother had been a widow such a long time. Her best years were burnt to ash by a dessicating fidelity to the memory of her dead husband. In his brief missive, the first person Khalid evoked was this woman harried by the hounds of judgment. In the last moments of his life he addressed his mother, begging her to forgive him. One of the most beautiful, moving gestures, rising from the depths of our geographical, psychic, and cultural soil, is the one in which two people, in the same movement and at the same time, give each other chaste kisses on the head and on the hands. They might be of different ages or sexes, of different social standing or character, but in this gesture all their dissimilarities and disagreements, even their hatred, if there has been any, evaporates. What remains is a gesture of reconciliation, a pardoning of mutual offenses, incomprehension, and wrongs that each might have done the other. I imagine, I am even certain of it without having witnessed it, that just a few moments beforehand, on that morning when I climbed the staircase with Khalid, this gesture flowered between him and his slandered mother, that woman hunted by gossip. This invisible gesture accompanied him like a traveler's viaticum. For his last journey. Excerpted from Endless Fall: A Little Chronicle by Mohamed Leftah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.