The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari (review)

In modern Arabic fiction, the membrane separating the living and the dead can seem at times oddly permeable. There are elements of the supernatural in some of Bahaa Taher's works, for example, including his prizewinning novel Sunset Oasis; the title of Radwa Ashour's semiautobiographical novel Specters speaks for itself, and the heroines of her novels Siraaj and Blue Lorries commune with the dead. Likewise, Youssef Al-Firsiwi, the central narrator of Moroccan writer Mohammed Achaari's extraordinary novel The Arch and the Butterfly, holds frequent, animated discourse with his son Yacine's ghost, after learning that Yacine—whom he had believed was in France studying architecture—has joined a group of religious extremists, gone off to Afghanistan, and been killed there. Achaari's novel could be read as the struggle of a man estranged from himself coming to grips with a world composed of irreconcilable divisions—including that between the living and the dead; for "the dead," as Yacine's ghost remarks on page 80, "don't have answers!"

The narrator quickly establishes that, well before the death of his son, he was already living a life constrained by alienation from those to whom he ought to have been most intimately bound. He evinces little affect in his self-presentation, whether in reference to his marriage, his son, his childhood, or the three years he spent in prison thanks to his affiliation with the socialist movement. His marriage of twenty-five years has been a sham from its beginnings, and his relationship with his father is tainted by the tragic circumstances of his mother's death—officially a suicide, although doubt is cast on the elder Firsiwi's innocence in the matter. Either way, Yacine's mother, a German expatriate, is herself a casualty of alienation, both in her troubled marriage and in the village where she and her husband lived, into whose society she strove assiduously to assimilate herself, only to be coldly rejected by the villagers as the strange blue-eyed Christian in their midst: forever and irremediably an outsider.

Youssef, a journalist, has two close friends: Ibrahim al-Khayati and Ahmad Majd. The friendship dates back to the three men's youthful activities in the socialist movement, but since that time both Ibrahim and Ahmad have made their fortunes through capitalist enterprise. Their personal stories, as the novel's events unfold, intertwine with Youssef's in complex ways.

The news of Yacine's fate seems at first to plunge Youssef still further into his emotional isolation, a development that manifests itself metaphorically in the loss of his sense of smell. He is beset at first by a cold, insulating rage rather than by sorrow, while his wife, Bahia, gives way to grief; their marriage is eventually undone by their differences—irreconcilable, like so much else—over how to respond to their son's death. As Youssef struggles to regain his footing amid these convulsions of loss, he gropes his way toward access to his emotions, at first obliquely, through a newspaper column he devises: "Letters to My Beloved." Gradually, even while Yacine's fate continues to haunt him, he embarks on a new relationship with a woman half-remembered from his past.

These events are set against the backdrop of a Morocco that is at once static, under its oppressive monarchy, and in the process of dynamic change, which includes a re-envisioning of the urban landscape. Yacine himself, before he was fatally drawn to radical ideology, had conceived of a grand arch that would span the Bou Regreg River, linking the cities of Rabat and Salé—a project his parents endeavor to bring to fruition, with equivocal results. Ahmad Majd undertakes the construction of a massive, butterfly-shaped apartment building in Marrakech. The novel's title is explained in these motifs—visual representations of transformation, whether symbolic or functional.

Youssef's efforts to reassemble a coherent life in the...