Moroccan mystery, enigmatic fable
By Anderson Tepper |
February 6, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
HASSAN, the "storyteller" of Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's new novel, is more than a narrator: he is a guide, a witness, a showman, a chronicler of Moroccan legend and lore. His stage is the central square of Marrakesh, Djemaa el Fna, where the myriad wonders of this great, red-walled city surround and inspire him. "All around me the city spreads out its wares - its many narratives - and I survey them as if from a high place," he proclaims. Indeed, his vantage point allows him to draw freely the raw materials of his craft: "It is a landscape filled with allegories, where the imagination is law, and storytellers can spend entire days resuscitating mysteries."
On this particular night, however, Hassan is concerned with only one mystery: the story of a foreign couple, a beautiful French-American woman and her Indian partner, who vanished from the square one evening a few years earlier. It's a baffling case, prompting a range of questions: Were they abducted or were they on the run? Were they naive and reckless, wandering among the kif-smokers and drummers of the night? Or were they seeking some sort of personal escape and oblivion?
But Hassan's tale isn't simply an account of a crime. He aims to tease out the various strands of hearsay and rumor, to string his audience along well into the night.
Hassan repeatedly yields the floor to the crowd -- a colorful cross-section of Moroccan society, from fortunetellers to acrobats, Tuareg tribesmen to Berber merchants - who have their own versions of what happened that night. As Mustafa, Hassan's imprisoned brother, who may have been involved in the couple's disappearance, beseeches him: "Make my story into a fable, Hassan, as only you can."
And that is what, in the end, "The Storyteller of Marrakesh" is: an enigmatic fable in the tradition of "The Thousand and One Nights," an extended examination of its own narrative powers in which the stories within the stories come to resemble an intricate, miniaturist design. The many interruptions and digressions can test the reader's patience, but it is the evocation of place that truly animates the novel. The Djemaa el Fna is alive in a way many of the characters themselves are not - it is multidimensional, both metaphor and microcosm.
Indian author Roy-Bhattacharya has clearly immersed himself in the richness of Moroccan life and history. It makes a lively home for his questing imagination.
On this particular night, however, Hassan is concerned with only one mystery: the story of a foreign couple, a beautiful French-American woman and her Indian partner, who vanished from the square one evening a few years earlier. It's a baffling case, prompting a range of questions: Were they abducted or were they on the run? Were they naive and reckless, wandering among the kif-smokers and drummers of the night? Or were they seeking some sort of personal escape and oblivion?
But Hassan's tale isn't simply an account of a crime. He aims to tease out the various strands of hearsay and rumor, to string his audience along well into the night.
Hassan repeatedly yields the floor to the crowd -- a colorful cross-section of Moroccan society, from fortunetellers to acrobats, Tuareg tribesmen to Berber merchants - who have their own versions of what happened that night. As Mustafa, Hassan's imprisoned brother, who may have been involved in the couple's disappearance, beseeches him: "Make my story into a fable, Hassan, as only you can."
And that is what, in the end, "The Storyteller of Marrakesh" is: an enigmatic fable in the tradition of "The Thousand and One Nights," an extended examination of its own narrative powers in which the stories within the stories come to resemble an intricate, miniaturist design. The many interruptions and digressions can test the reader's patience, but it is the evocation of place that truly animates the novel. The Djemaa el Fna is alive in a way many of the characters themselves are not - it is multidimensional, both metaphor and microcosm.
Indian author Roy-Bhattacharya has clearly immersed himself in the richness of Moroccan life and history. It makes a lively home for his questing imagination.
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