Description
A tour de force: an utterly singular modern Moroccan classic
“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.
Reviews
"Bouanani sought to bring out the truth of his homeland even as that land itself, one way or another, rendered honest expression impossible; he had no end of impediments and no more than the narrowest way out. Yet with The Hospital he made it, demonstrating, again, how the best work can run any gantlet, even one lined with devils." — John Domini, Brooklyn Rail
"Hallucinatory." — Guy Gunaratne, Guardian
"The Hospital has attained cult status." — The Brooklyn Rail
Also By: Ahmed Bouanani 
The Shutters
Paperback, 2018
This surreal poetry maps Morocco’s cultural history, as Bouanani hauntingly evokes all of the violence inflicted on his country
The Shutters
E Book, 2018
This surreal poetry maps Morocco’s cultural history, as Bouanani hauntingly evokes all of the violence inflicted on his country
Also By: Anna Della Subin
Laziness in the Fertile Valley
Paperback, 2013
A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile"
Laziness in the Fertile Valley
E Book, 2013
A portrait of a family of proud layabouts who avoid work and sleep all day by the Egyptian writer often referred to as "the Voltaire of the Nile"
