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The Pleasure Marriage
In The Pleasure Marriage, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the epic story of a romance that explores desire and the intolerance for interracial marriage in Moroccan society. Amir is a prosperous merchant based in Fez, where he has a wife and four children. On one of his annual business trips to Senegal, he enters into a "pleasure marriage"--a temporary union permitted by Islamic law--with the alluring Nabou. Overcome by her passion and sensuality, he falls in love, with repercussions for three generations scarred by racism, immigration, and deportation. Nabou returns to Fez as Amir's second wife, weathering the jealous cruelty of Lalla Fatma, his first partner. Isolated within her new home, Nabou gives birth to twin sons, one black and one white, who come of age on the opposite sides of racial, social, and political chasms and who chart vastly different courses. The Pleasure Marriage showcases Ben Jelloun's mastery of metaphor and lyrical narrative as he continues to take us into the worlds of Moroccan culture through his exquisite language and literary genius.
Book Details
- Publisher: Curbstone Press
- Publish Date: Jun 15th, 2021
- Pages: 160
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.00in - 0.40in - 0.45lb
- EAN: 9780810143593
- Categories: • Romance - Multicultural & Interracial
About the Author
TAHAR BEN JELLOUN is an acclaimed Moroccan-born French novelist, poet, essayist, and intellectual. As a young man, Ben Jelloun spent time in a Moroccan army camp for taking part in a student demonstration. He sought exile in Paris in 1971 and has since become one of France's most celebrated authors, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for The Sacred Night and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2004 for This Blinding Absence of Light.
RITA S. NEZAMI teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University, where her teaching and research interests include the rhetorics of global issues, creative nonfiction, visual rhetoric, and postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone literatures. Northwestern University Press published her translation of Ben Jelloun's By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring in 2016.
RITA S. NEZAMI teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University, where her teaching and research interests include the rhetorics of global issues, creative nonfiction, visual rhetoric, and postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone literatures. Northwestern University Press published her translation of Ben Jelloun's By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring in 2016.
Praise for this book
"Ben Jelloun brilliantly weaves a spellbinding fictional history of modern Morocco with an unflinching look at issues of race, immigration, and gender. A masterpiece of storytelling." --Jonathan Smolin, author of Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture
"A very generous book, written in the form of a fairy tale but set in history. A book one needs to read slowly to digest its nuggets of wisdom, beauty and wit. Tahar Ben Jelloun is not only a master storyteller, with this book he proves to also be a moralist for a time and a continent in need of one." --Patrice Nganang, author of Mount Pleasant: A Novel "The Pleasure Marriage is a bittersweet tale, the kind of philosophical fable Tahar Ben Jelloun knows how to construct so well. Behind the flow of the narrative, behind the humor and tenderness, there also hides the denunciation of a patriarchal and racist society where the law of the strongest dominates. The Pleasure Marriage is also a great romance novel, about the love we feel for our lover as well as the love that we can feel for a child who is different from others. Set in Dakar, Fez and Tangier, The Marriage Pleasure is an ode to this Africa of travel and biracial marriage, and also an ode to difference and respect for others." --Leïla Slimani, author of In the Country of Others: A Novel
"There is a unique beauty to Ben Jelloun's storytelling, with its folktale allure effortlessly woven into a succinct, modern commentary." --Daniel Bokemper, World Literature Today "A novel that confronts the stigma of racism and the taboo topic of racial discrimination in modern Moroccan society. This audacious and provocative story explores the love and affection, as well as the agony and tragic suffering that imbue the intertwined lives of three generations descending from a mixed marriage between Amir, a rich trader from the imperial city of Fez, and Nabou, a woman from Senegal." --Ahmed Idrissi Alami, author of Mutual Othering: Islam, Modernity, and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Pre-Colonial Moroccan and European Travel Writing