This is a novel about a boy’s love for his past, for his great tribe of an extended family, for the look and variety and tastesand bedeviling charms of Morocco, this country so vast and incomprehensible that he puts its name in quotation marks(“Morocco”) as if it truly exists only on posters aimed at tourists,as an abstraction despite its very real and disparate pleasures.

This is also a novel about fear. A young Moroccan arrives in Geneva to finish his studies at the university and the middle-aged Swiss academic who has invited him to live with himisn’t there. The Moroccan (the narrator of the book) has nomoney and no place to go. Fortunately he is told by a kindlystranger to go to the Salvation Army, where he’s given a bedby a man who resembles Michel Foucault and who isabsorbed by his reading of Benjamin Constant’s great novel ofpassion, Adolphe.

Everything in this book is odd, even the administrator at the university in charge of his dossier, an alcoholic womanwho is by turns giddy with merriment and erupting intofierce rages. The Moroccan sits on a park bench, a quickie sexpartner gives him an orange to eat, he takes a sip from a fountain—and recognizes it as a Wallace fountain from his Frenchtextbooks about Paris. If the secret to great fiction, as theRussian Formalists argued, is defamiliarization, makingeverything known seem strange, then nothing could be moreaccomplished and persuasive than this mysterious novel. Theboy himself is foreign to us, our world is foreign to him,everyone is a foreigner in love with the “other” (whether thatbe a Swiss man or an older brother).

This is a book about someone at a moment of transition between being a nice Moroccan boy, one of nine children,someone enamored of his own parents and big brother, a good kid—and becoming a French intellectual, a Parisian and a published novelist. Despite the extreme simplicity and clarity ofTaïa’s style, we sense how sophisticated he is—that this is a simplicity that only intelligence and experience and wide readingin several languages can buy. Not only has the language beenchastened, but the selection of scenes to show and to excludehas also been subjected to a draconian editing process.