2 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
The Expelled is a surreal novel by Mois Benarroch. Trying to explain the plot of this book is difficult. I understood it, but the actual storyline is unique, and it takes a bit of explaining. It’s a novel within a novel: a parable-like story about one bus and its surreal journey is placed between the protagonist’s tale of a strange love affair he finds himself caught up in.
The story begins with the narrator, an author, meeting a young woman in the bus station who looks exactly like a younger version of his wife. She even has the same name: Gabriele. The two begin to have an affair, and she asks for him to read to her the novel that he’s working on. That novel is a story about a bus, traveling cross-country, where a division is created between those in the front and those in the back.
To this book’s credit, it is one of the most unique I’ve read in a long time. It had a structure and style that was very out-of-the-box, and I could not tell where it was going or what was going to happen next. In my opinion, that’s almost always a good thing. On top of that, the narrator tackled lots of difficult issues, like prejudice and infidelity, and did them in a way that forced me to think.
Creating a surreal plot, though, and telling it in such a different way, can work to the writer’s disadvantage. One of the biggest problems I had with this book was the grammar. It’s sad when a novel has lots of potential, yet is rife with run-on sentences and simple mistakes in punctuation. This may, in fact, be something wrong with the translation. As I understand, it was originally written in Spanish. The fault may be with the translator. Still, it’s distracting for English readers. Also, not all of the issues are explained in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand. The author talks about the Moroccan Jews, and the prejudice they face in Israel. Obviously life is more complicated than that, and the narrator attempts to explain it, but, mingled into such surreal parable-like stories, I ended up growing rather confused.
The novel is short, but it still drags on at points. There are a few passages in particular where the narrator is describing his own troubles with being a writer, publishing, and the trials of being a member of ‘the expelled,’ and they go on and on, seemingly to no purpose. I learned nothing I didn’t already know in those sections of the book, and they were just hard to get through.
If you enjoy surreal stories, or fantasy tales with a bizarre slant, then this book may be for you. There were multiple redeeming qualities to it, and it did make me stop and think at some points.
Sadly, though, I have to give this book 2 out of 4 stars. It was unique, and there were some things that were interesting to me, but, in the end, it was muddled and drawn-out. There were moments when I just felt like the author was trying to be avant-garde, and it didn’t help when there were constant grammar mistakes. Whether that was a problem with the translation or the original, it was still distracting.
******
The Expelled
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes
Like jhmende's review? Post a comment saying so!