Solitaire

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.