Jelloun Tahar Ben

Mohamed emigrated from Morocco to France to work in a factory, a harsh life that enabled him to raise five children. They are now estranged from him because they are integrated into French society, whereas he has remained tied to his traditions, feeling Moroccan rather than French. The daily grind of an intense working life allowed him to conceal, first and foremost from his own conscience, the discomfort with a culture he does not share and his refusal to integrate, to resign himself to Western ways. Retirement age arrives, however, and he can no longer escape a sense of unease he has always harbored: that of being “someone who never found his place.” Most of the short novel is the narrative of an inner journey. Mohamed tries by every means to give meaning to life as a French pensioner, but he would have to spend his days at the café, > drink beer? Out of the question. Watch TV, follow the race results, fantasize about those half-naked girls who populate American TV shows? Or take the advice of a fellow countryman: move back to his home village and take a pretty girl as a second wife. Neither solution is possible. The bond with his own tradition, religion, land, and the customs of his Morocco is too strong within him. His rectitude and sense of family duty do not allow him, either, to offend his wife or set himself at odds with his children. > Mohamed set off, his fists clenched in his pockets. He thought of his children and had the feeling of having lost them. He felt himself plummeting into the void, hurled into nothingness like a sack of rubble. A sack full of things that are no longer of any use. In this sack lay a rat, long dead. And from it emanated an unbearable stench. He told himself: I am the sack and the rat, I am the stones and the rusted iron, I am the creature that nobody loves... Mohamed no longer exists. No one thinks of him anymore, no one calls for his presence. It is over, he has reached the end of the long road . And so Mohamed reacts to this anguish in the only way imaginable for him, an emigrant and a stranger to his new homeland: returning to his country, building a large house capable of accommodating his whole family. Yet, as a shadow that appeared before him told him, this building will be > a place of penance for lost souls like you, strangers who no longer know who they are or where they come from . The final part of the novel is, precisely, the account of this journey, which cannot but end in a solitary death, seated in an armchair that > sank deeper every day... only the head stuck out (until) on the fortieth day the earth swallowed the head.. (and) in a few days the grave was covered with lush green grass . It is as if Morocco were taking him back after a lifetime of exile: a dark yet beautiful image. The novel addresses some traditional themes of the immigrant condition, balanced between the land of origin and the host country. Retirement is the catalyst for men who found in work a way to hide from themselves that deep existential unease, which derives from a condition increasingly isolated from, if not in conflict with, the new generations. It is very interesting that the entire narrative revolves around the intergenerational relationship, rather than tackling predictable cultural and sociological issues. The distinctive element of the novel is the figure of Mohamed. He seeks no loopholes or half-measures, but stubbornly and wretchedly confronts his estrangement from French society and the dream of returning to his own culture. But to whom, then, does the author refer with that *Lei* of the title: to the nostalgia for his homeland that killed him, or rather to Mohamed's own rectitude, which forbids him from accepting compromises? Very well written, it is nevertheless a pity that an intellectualized imprint can be felt, which deprives the narrative of sincerity. The leap between the bulk of the book, made of psychological introspections, and the oneiric, surreal final section is too stark. Why read it? It is very well written; yet the author loses himself in the psychological mechanisms of the protagonist.