The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers

July 11, 2016
Few writers can match the ingenuity and frenetic energy that Laroui, a leading Moroccan economist, summons in this collection, winner of France's Prix Goncourt for short fiction. Recently arrived in Brussels on a trade mission, the titular Dassoukine meets a fellow Moroccan and bemoans the theft of his suit pants. The only replacement trousers he could find were decorated with "a yucky brown, an evanescent green," and so he was forced to "play out a great scene of Third World indignation" to preserve his dignity. However absurd the content of these stories, the bitter legacy of colonialism is impossible to avoid. Laroui is at his most riveting when he seeks to complicate immigrant narrative tropes through formal innovation. In "Dislocation," a narrator ("Moroccan by birth, in body, but âFrench in the head'â") obsessively contemplates his Dutch wife, beginning with a thoroughly familiar question: "What would it be like, he asked himself, a world where everything was foreign?" But this question is injected with parentheticals, asides, and addenda until it balloons into a delirious evocation of the second-guessing. Hamid, the narrator of "The Invention of Dry Swimming," encapsulates this striking collection: "ââWe are' said Hamid (he paused), âwe are (he swallowed a sip of coffee), we are (he put down the cup) an inventive people.'â"

Starred review from October 1, 2016

Moroccan-born Laroui, a professor of French literature at the University of Amsterdam, makes his English-language debut with this Prix Goncourt-winning story collection. Laroui uses a wry, dry, knowing style to address identity and otherness, showing how focus on such issues defines the immigrant experience. In "Born Nowhere," for instance, a young Moroccan man in a cafe complains more and more loudly to another about the wrong birth place and date on his identity card until a woman reprimands them for shaming their land of birth, "because I'm Moroccan...even though I was born in Vietnam to a Russian father. Incidentally, am I really a woman?" In "Dislocation," a triumph of content and style, a Utrecht-based Moroccan man considers what it would be like to live in "a world where everything is foreign," then repeats that idea in ever-expanding paragraphs as he argues that he's "French in the head" while eventually acknowledging that he's seen as an outsider. Yet the story has an unexpectedly affirmative ending. VERDICT Terrific stuff, insightful and often blackly funny.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.