|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
Review
"Here in the United States, it's easy to become jaded about the coming out narrative. It can feel like a story we've read one time too many, one that has somehow become commodified, fraught with predictability. But every once in a while a novel comes along that shatters our jaded state and renews our faith in the queer coming of age genre. Abdellah Taïa's Salvation Army is one such book." Alistair McCartney Lambda Report
"In a simple and straightforward language, the author leads the reader through a journey of uncertainty and self-discovery, beyond the nuanced resonance of words and emotions. Writing, which he discovers at an early age, involves for him a courageous and unprecedented act of exposing his country's taboos and prohibitions." Mustapha Hamil Tingus Magazine
"Just when you thought you'd read every coming out story imaginable, a book as fresh and original as this one enlivens the genre." Noël Alumit Frontiers in LA
"The novel is richly layered yet impressively lean, and as easily enjoyed by the pool as at a university library." Glen Helfand Bay Area Reporter
"This straightforward story about self-discovery is a reminder that coming-of-age tales still need to be told." Richard Labonte
Book Description
An autobiographical novel by turn naïve and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taïa is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taïa's life with complete disclosure--from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country's press as "the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference," Taïa, through his calmly transgressive work, has "outed" himself as "the only gay man" in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Taïa's work both a literary and political event. The arrival of Salvation Army (published in French in 2006) in English will be welcomed by an American audience already familiar with a growing cadre of talented Arab writers working in French (including Muhammad Dib, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Katib Yasin).
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
Right? Not really. It is not your average coming out story. Not at all. Taia puts together an amazingly sobering story about growing up in a culture in which your reality is not considered. He is love with his brother and the brother may not even notice. The very fact of having eleven siblings can leave anyone feeling lost in their own family, but Taia retains a distinct personality through and through.
Whether he is writing about North Africa or Western Europe, Taia seems to have found a way to put things in perspective -- at least for himself. He finds North African lovers be warm, passionate and full of love for life. On the other hand, his Western European affairs tend to leave him yearning for more. And while he finds laughter and the exotic bliss of life in his family, it is Western Europe where yearns to find the peace and happiness one finds in freedom.
In the end, for me it was not a story fully told. Perhaps this is the Western jadedness in me. Perhaps I had forgotten what it was to be from the East, cultures where the less people reveal the better they feel. Or perhaps it was all lost in the translation. Whatever it was, I felt cheated. I felt cheated out of the details of a wonderful story. Would I buy it again? Oh, so yes.
McCartney looks at the book as a version of the coming-out novel that was once a staple of gay writing, given new freshness by its unique setting and, perhaps, by the extreme subject position of its main character. White views it partly as a jeremiad against Western sex tourism. I kept reading through the whole thing and couldn't find either of those books; what I saw was the astonishingly frank story of a young boy who knows his feelings are an offense to society, but who persists in them anyhow. His incestuous love for an older brother--a brother much, much older, a brother old enough nearly to be the boy's father--his delight in the brother's company, in his fruity cologne, his body--is the book's core, and then there's another story tacked onto it about having two affairs with Swiss men, and how cold the Swiss guys are compared to the hot, passionate men of Morocco. But whole sections of the novel seem to have slid off the sides of the page, so that I close the book feeling a hunger for what has been left unsaid, unwritten, or censored, perhaps by the same self that has been so eager to detail the intricacies of Abdelkabir's butt in and out of those sexy black underpants.
Frank Stock's translation is pretty amazing, and you feel like you are right there, in Geneva's cold capital, on the hot beaches of North Africa, or wherever Taia chooses to bring you. For me, SALVATION ARMY just needed one more thing, can't tell you what exactly, in order to recommend it to you without reservation.
I couldn't agree more. Abdellah's undefined worship/lust for his older brother was comfortably unrequited (and most likely unnoticed). However that love, the narrator's earliest most secret love, is just one of the love stories depicted in Salvation Army - among them love of family, culture, country and life itself.
I fell in love with this book -- with what it depicted and what it did not -- and with Abdellah Taļa, Morocco's very first openly gay author to publish a memoir, one so real and naked that they both will always dominate that warmest, most exotic corner of my heart. ~ Taylor Siluwé, author of Dancing With The Devil
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
|
