Solitaire: A Novel

by Hassouna Mosbahi, William Maynard Hutchins (Translator)

In Hassouna Mosbahi’s engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual. A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunis is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul. Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves. On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage. Yunus’s identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval. He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives. Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi’s elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.

227 pages, Paperback

Published May 18, 2022

About the author

Hassouna Mosbahi was a Tunisian author, literary critic, and freelance journalist.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Hassouna Mosbahi’s engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual.

A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunus is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul.

Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves.

On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage.

Yunus’s identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval.

He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives.

Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi’s elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Quiet ruminations of a man younger than me that I'd've hated at forty, been scared by at fifty, and...uncomfortably...relate to at *mumble*ty-five.

I seemed to be a dead man granted a chance to observe the joy of life from the darkness of the tomb. The glass escaped from my hand, and shards of its glass flew across the kitchen floor. I did not hear the laughter overflowing with love that a smashing glass had inspired in a poet—it may have been Apollinaire, Eluard, or someone else. What I heard was my spirit splintering like the dry bough of a green tree. I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom to curl up in bed. I closed my eyes, wishing to flee from my black soul to another world. At some moment, a different vision of my country dawned on me—not the vague, gloomy one I had grown accustomed to harboring as an expatriate. It came to me with the radiant light of a Mediterranean morning on the beach at Les Grottes in Bizerte, green and fragrant like the vineyards and the orchards of figs and almonds in the spring at Raf Raf, dreamy like sunset in the oases of el-Djerid, and white and blue like the houses in Sidi Bou Said. I leapt out of bed happily, like someone who had long misplaced something and found it again after despairing that he ever would find it. So, I returned to my fatherland.

It's nice, and it's resonant...I felt the same way returning to New York after exile in Texas...but y'all, do not overlook that "fatherland" ending this passage. This is not a western country but a westernized one, and it really shows. There are assumptions inside this narrative invisible to a Tunisian man of a certain age, women exist in relation to me being the most toxic one.

It's not unusual, honestly, in literature from anywhere to see men taking women for granted. It bothers me more now than ever because the world is at the intersection of multiple crises and can not remotely afford to turn away minds and hands needed to figure out then apply solutions to the problems we face.

A shame it's not so stone-cold simple, and obvious, to the old white men desperately clinging to power.

As I was saying...Author Mosbahi has some assumptions that jangle warning bells in my 21st-century-woke mind. The narrator, still less the author, demonstrate the remotest awareness of their cultural blinders, which the best, the most successful critically anyway, US writers are at long last coming to do. We've all got miles to go before we sleep.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really came into this book with an open mind, wanting to like it. I found it in an effort to familiarize myself with Tunisian literature. The book started off really strong, which is probably the only reason I finished it. I do plainly see how this book captures the sentiments of a generation and parts of it are just tragically beautiful. But ultimately, I found the narrative stilted and my mind wandered a lot. Some of the magic of the writing may have been lost in translation, so I tried to ignore that. I have to say, and I know this comes down to cultural differences which I tried very hard to put aside while reading this, but this book expresses some incredibly backward, and many would agree offensive, ideas about women. Every single woman in this book is either in the grips of sexual ecstasy, a hateful bitch, or someone's sexless, personality-less mother. There was one part where the protagonist's lover can't come because her mother is very ill and she has to take her to the hospital. The protagonist utters not a word of concern for her or her mother, neither out loud nor in his inner monologue, and is instead just upset that he won't get laid that day. It's honestly pretty gross. I kept reading because I wanted the rest of the book to make up for this cultural disconnect, but ultimately it didn't surpass that barrier for me.

[غبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I went to the window and looked out at the street. At the bus stop across the street, a young man and a young woman were trading kisses as their bodies melded. The scene alarmed me. I seemed to be a dead man granted a chance to observe the joy of life from the darkness of the tomb. The glass escaped from my hand, and shards of its glass flew across the kitchen floor. I did not hear the laughter overflowing with love that a smashing glass had inspired in a poet—it may have been Apollinaire, Eluard, or someone else. What I heard was my spirit splintering like the dry bough of a green tree. I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom to curl up in bed. I closed my eyes, wishing to flee from my black soul to another world. At some moment, a different vision of my country dawned on me—not the vague, gloomy one I had grown accustomed to harboring as an expatriate. It came to me with the radiant light of a Mediterranean morning on the beach at Les Grottes in Bizerte, green and fragrant like the vineyards and the orchards of figs and almonds in the spring at Raf Raf, dreamy like sunset in the oases of el-Djerid, and white and blue like the houses in Sidi Bou Said. I leapt out of bed happily, like someone who had long misplaced something and found it again after despairing that he ever would find it. So, I returned to my fatherland."

—p150