This bewildering, hallucinatory book begins with the fairytale-like story of an eighth daughter who is raised by her father as the male heir he never had. No one else in the family knows the secret; named Ahmed, (s)he is dressed as a boy, treated as a boy, and speedily inducted into the ways of the patriarchy. ‘His sisters served him his lunches and dinners,’ we are told. ‘He did not allow himself any tenderness towards his mother, whom he saw rarely.’

We are being promised, it seems, a parable about the gender imbalances of Moroccan society. Ahmed gradually retires from communal life and spends hours alone in his room, staring in solitude and confusion at his naked female body. He has absorbed what seems to be a fundamental lesson:

Etre femme est une infirmité naturelle dont tout le monde s'accommode. Etre homme est une illusion et une violence que tout justifie et privilégie. Etre tout simplement est un défi.

[To be a woman is a natural disability which everyone makes the best of. To be a man is an illusion and a violence which everything justifies and prioritises. Simply to be is a challenge.]

Ben Jelloun never takes the easy route when playing with these ideas. Just as it looks like he is building to a grand critique of religious authoritarianism, someone bursts out, ‘If our women are inferior to men, it's not because God says so or because the Prophet decreed as much – but because they accept their fate.’ Later, when our protagonist goes out into the streets finally presenting as a woman, she immediately comes up against male harassment and the male gaze. But even this is presented in unusually complex terms:

Sortir, être bousculée, être dans la foule et sentir qu'une main d'homme caresse maladroitement mes fesses. Pour beaucoup de femmes, c'est très désagréable. Je le comprends. Pour moi, ce serait la première main anonyme qui se poserait sur mon dos ou mes hanches. Je ne me retournerais pas pour ne pas voir quel visage porte cette main. Si je le voyais, je serais probablement horrifiée. Mais les mauvaises manières, les gestes vulgaires peuvent avoir parfois un peu de poésie, juste ce qu'il faut pour ne pas se mettre en colère. Une petite touche qui ne démentirait pas l'érotisme de ce peuple. Ce sont surtout les voyageurs européens qui ont le mieux senti et le mieux évoqué cet érotisme, en peinture comme en littérature, même si derrière tout cela une pointe de supériorité blanche guidait leurs pas.

[To go out, to be jostled, to be in a crowd and feel a man's hand awkwardly fondling my ass…for a lot of women it's extremely unwelcome. I can understand that. For me, it would be the first anonymous hand that touched my back, or my hips. I wouldn't turn round to see which face was attached to the hand. If I saw, I'd probably be horrified. But bad manners, vulgar gestures, can sometimes have a little poetry in them – just enough not to get angry. A light touch, that would not belie the eroticism of this people. It was mainly European travellers who best sensed, and best described, this eroticism, in painting as in literature – even though, behind it all, their steps were guided by a sense of white superiority.]

Orientalism by way of street harassment, mediated by a transgender narrator and ultimately filtered through the gaze of a male author? You can see that there's a lot to think about in this small book. The pronouns shift and switch repeatedly, sometimes within a sentence (‘he no longer slept with the acrobats, but in the women's caravan; she ate and went out with them’). This is even more apparent in French, where even in the first-person sections the gender of the speaker is always and unavoidably marked.

I read L'Enfant de sable in two one-day chunks, which was a strange experience, because the second half of the book is in many ways quite unlike the first. I see that a lot of reviewers wanted a whole novel about gender fluidity, a Maghrebi Orlando, but in fact that's not what this ends up being. Ben Jelloun's prose, always very poetic, starts to come apart, to fly off into something much more uncertain and metaphorical.

To be fair, he warns you at the start. ‘This story is also a desert,’ he (or one of his narrators) says; ‘you're going to have to walk over the burning sands in bare feet, walk and shut up, and believe in the oasis forming on the horizon….’ I rather warmed to this reader-unfriendly approach. As one of his walk-ons says late in the story:

Et puis un livre, du moins tel que je le conçois, est un labyrinthe fait à dessein pour confondre les hommes, avec l'intention de les perdre et de les ramener aux dimensions étroites de leurs ambitions.

[Anyway, a book, at least as I see it, is a labyrinth that's designed to confuse people – with the intention of losing them, bringing them out of the narrow confines of their ambitions.]

The play with gender identity turns into a much wider interrogation of the social violence that underpins patriarchy; and this, in turn, becomes an interrogation of the way narratives themselves are even told. At first, our protagonist's story is being told by one of the public storytellers in Marrakech (for more on these guys, see this obscure review that I wrote yonks ago); in the second half of the book, this voice is replaced, and then replaced again, as various characters relate their own opinions on what exactly happened to the central character. Are they even a central character anymore? It's hard to know who is who, and what is supposed to be taken seriously, which version of the truth we are expected to approve.

Just go with it. Ben Jelloun will take you off somewhere; you might not want to go, but he'll take you anyway, and then drop you, miles from where you started, looking around in an unfamiliar landscape, full of new and strange ideas. ( )

This is a haunting tale of a female child who is born the eighth daughter and raised as a boy on the instructions of her father who wanted a male heir. The novel was written in French and published in 1985. The uncertain ending aroused such interest in readers that Ben Jelloun continued the story in two more novels.
The story starts and ends with storytellers, men in a market sitting on a mat who claim to have the secret journal of our despondent young man, named Ahmed, later reclaiming his female identity as Zahra. Ahmed retreated to an attic as a young man and in addition to writing a journal he also corresponded with an anonymous observer, a man who followed his actions in the street.
The life Ahmed lives as a man in a woman's body would be sufficient to fill a novel like this, but the book really took off for me with the inclusion of the multiple narrators. The different endings of the life of our character, given by the different narrators and the diaries make this a book to read more than once. It is not as smooth as the other books I have read by this author but I was glad to reread it as soon as I finished it. ( )

Plusieurs narations pour conter l'histoire d'une fille dont les parents décident de l'élever comme un garçon. ( )

A story with potential, but it never takes off.
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En historia som har potential, men som - tyvärr - aldrig riktigt lyfter. ( )