The Happy Marriage
-
-
3.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Ben Jelloun is arguably Morocco’s greatest living author, whose impressive body of work combines intellect and imagination in magical fusion.” —The Guardian
In The Happy Marriage, the internationally acclaimed Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of one couple—first from the husband’s point of view, then from the wife’s—just as legal reforms are about to change women’s rights forever.
The husband, a painter in Casablanca, has been paralyzed by a stroke at the very height of his career and becomes convinced that his marriage is the sole reason for his decline.
Walled up within his illness and desperate to break free of a deeply destructive relationship, he finds escape in writing a secret book about his hellish marriage. When his wife finds it, she responds point by point with her own version of the facts, offering her own striking and incisive reinterpretation of their story.
Who is right and who is wrong? A thorny issue in a society where marriage remains a sacrosanct institution, but where there’s also a growing awareness of women’s rights. And in their absorbing struggle, both sides of this modern marriage find out they may not be so enlightened after all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The least harmonious of unions yields up two dueling halves in Ben Jelloun's fascinating novel about a marriage that's all plot, scheme, and disenchantment. In the first part, a Moroccan painter in his 50s, recovering from a stroke in Casablanca in 2000, reflects on his tempestuous 14-year marriage to Amina, who unlike her urbane, Fez-born husband, hails from a poor, rural tribe in the village of Khamsa. The two wed in France, where the painter moved in his youth to study; 14 years Amina's senior, he is a success by the time they meet, and their first years together in Paris are blissful, though their families disapprove. But disagreements, when they come, are ruinous; Amina is enraged by her husband's many affairs, and when the couple returns to Morocco in 1995, she acquires a circle of friends the painter finds abhorrent. "he... reserved the best of herself for others," he thinks, "while keeping the worst" for him. Amina's version of the story, following her husband's, doesn't discount her anger, but justifies it: the painter, she writes, "wasn't generous," so her pilfering of his accounts was only to keep their children fed. She "went out of way to upset him," Amina writes, but only because of the hurt he had always inflicted on her. Readers will be drawn as deeply as the warring spouses into this disastrous alliance; each memorable and vivid narrative corroborates and condemns the other.
