The narrative revolves around the life of Ayoub Benaissa, an ex-professor of English literature, who lives as an impoverished and speechless recluse in a typical Moroccan town. Ayoub has a heavy limp, incurred a few year…
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The narrative revolves around the life of Ayoub Benaissa, an ex-professor of English literature, who lives as an impoverished and speechless recluse in a typical Moroccan town. Ayoub has a heavy limp, incurred a few years earlier in a tragic accident, kept by the third-person narrator shrouded in mystery until the last part of the novel. His limited financial means notwithstanding, he is a ‘frequent flyer’, driven by a compulsive need to ‘travel’ every Saturday. Because of his egregiously bad limp, he undergoes a series of humiliating incidents during his tumultuous trips to the airport. All the while, despite all the irritations of the present, he finds time to escape back into the past, summoning up through an overactive memory, in a stream-of-consciousness manner, significant milestones in his life. Although he is diminished, his consciousness remains that of an intellectual, capable of making perceptive commentary about himself and others, about his own country and the rest of the world.
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