A01=Ahmed Bouanani
A24=Anna Della Subin
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Ahmed Bouanani
automatic-update
B06=Lara Vergnaud
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FB
Category=FM
Category=FMM
Category=FXM
Category=FXP
Category=FY
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_fantasy
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780811225762
- Weight: 157g
- Dimensions: 132 x 203mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jun 2018
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
“When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears.
Like Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka—or perhaps like Mann’s The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder—The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.
The filmmaker and writer Ahmed Bouanani (1938–2011) was born in Casablanca. When Bouanani was sixteen, during the final days of the colonial era, his father, a police officer, was assassinated—a tragedy that the artist returned to in his work for the rest of his life. Bouanani studied film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris for three years before returning to Morocco and going on to direct several classics of North African cinema. Most of his movies had their genesis in poems, and he published three collections during his lifetime, as well as the novel The Hospital, also appearing in English for the first time with New Directions. Never keen to publish, Bouanani left behind a trove of additional manuscripts. LARA VERGNAUD is an editor and literary translator who currently lives in Washington, D.C. Anna Della Subin is the author of Not Dead But Sleeping (2017). Her work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Times, and The White Review, among other places. She is a contributing editor at Bidoun.
