Gertrude

by Hassan Najmi, Hassan Najmi, Allen Roger (Translation)

As Hassan Najmi’s acclaimed novel begins, our unnamed narrator befriends an elderly man, Muhammad, who, as a young man, worked as a tour guide in the city of Tangier. Muhammad tells the narrator about his most famous clients, the renowned Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice Toklas, who—on the recommendation of Henri Matisse—hired Muhammad as their guide when they visited Morocco. Now close to death, Muhammad begs the narrator to take his papers and write his life story. We learn that Muhammad accepted Stein’s invitation to visit her in Paris. He participated in Stein’s famous salon, meeting the many luminaries in Stein’s circle. As the narrator is drawn into Muhammad’s story, he finds himself also drawn to a beautiful African-American woman who becomes as interested in the story of Stein’s visit to Morocco as she is in the young Moroccan who is researching it. Together they continue their quest into the past to rediscover Stein, in a novel that bursts with different varieties of passion at the hands of a master storyteller and poet.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Morocco

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2013

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow, I'm the first person on goodreads to have read this book. mind you, I guess it is fairly new.

anyway, it's an absolutely fabulous book. who would have thought a Moroccan writer would write a novel about Gertrude Stein? with the other main character being a Moroccan man? this man is a guide for Gertrude and Alice on a trip to Morocco and gets invited to visit Gertrude in Paris, where almost all of the action in the book takes place. and what's more the author manages to make the whole thing relatively plausible.

one of the most entertaining and well written books I've read in a long time. kudos to Interlink Publishing to having it translated and publishing it. I hope it gets a wide readership, it certainly deserves to. Highly recommended.

oh, and the translation from the Arabic is obviously extremely well done, as the prose flows beautifully throughout the whole book. and I'm a sucker for reading anything remotely to do with literary Paris in the 20's and 30's.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Clash of Civilizations theory may not be politically correct on its surface, but nevertheless seems to be ingrained in the collective consciousness of relations between “Muslims” and “non-Muslims”. It colors much of the discourse we engage in, with fundamentalists over-reacting to perceived Western encroachment, and “Westerners” pulling back from “religious” ideas that seem to encompass all areas of life. It would take an entire separate reflection to spell out my own belief that this is not so much a separation of civilizations as it is a separation of the esoteric from the exoteric. And this is just as true for those who claim to be religious as those who don’t.

In reality, cultures and their boundaries are much more fluid, but the interaction between them still shows marked differences, and I don’t think we’d have it any other way. There is unity in diversity – common human traits expressed through unique backgrounds. The relationships in Gertrude focus on those details of life that dissolve any sort of definition of particular culture. True, there are certain over-arching themes, e.g. the selfish Western cultural Imperialist who has the luxury of travelling the world, picking and choosing what they want for as long as they want, discarding people and ideas along the way. Yet the characters of Gertrude and Mohammad as micros of East/West are not so monolithic. The entire novel is a discourse on human life that is seen in the details. “We lose a great deal when we discover that we have not recorded all those details and that forgetfulness is now our partner” (260). Could it be that when we fail to record the details we resort to those monolithic black/white labels that seem to provide clarity? Do they really make things more clear?

Mohammad as a character is taken through an interaction with Western artistic life right down to conversations with people like Henri Matisse. Matisse says to Mohammad “the human eye is not merely an organ that reflects what it sees or even what it knows…it’s a shaping tool.” (161) The idea is to increase clarity through receptiveness: “You need to adjust your eyes a bit” (161). The adjustment could be in the sense of new interpretations, but also through widening the intake to gain more information. It’s those moments that we miss that can have the most meaning.

The seeker as virtuous is a more subtle idea here. However or wherever we seek, life will only be enhanced. Najmi-as-narrator expresses it this way in regards to his relationship with Lidia: “I flee towards such obscurity in order to escape a clarity that has drained both me and itself, to such an extent that there is nothing left that is worth investigation or discovery.” (170) The obscure that we hope to attain is the essence, an undefinable essence that, much like culture or monolithic ideas, can never be explicitly defined.

[Bettie]

to look into/hunt down