2 out of 4 stars
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Mois Benarroch's Gates To Tangier follows 4 (of 6) siblings, based in 4 different countries and living 4 distinctly separate lives, who find themselves forced by a stipulation in the will of their recently-deceased father to make a trip back to their Sephardic Jewish homeland of Morocco. The stipulation is to find their father's surprise illegitimate son, without whom they will be unable to claim their inheritance, and they are understandably far from enthusiastic about being landed in such a situation.
Nevertheless, they embark upon the mission, making several stopovers in different places along the way, and endeavour to track down their half-brother via his desperately ill mother- the family's former home help/nanny and a Muslim. As is the way with Benarroch's dialogue-laden writing, however, the reader is quickly made aware of far far more bubbling under the surface. While the siblings are initially focused only on the money, as they talk to eachother and travel via places familiar from their childhoods on their way “home”, each goes on another deeper journey.
Their family history is top of the agenda in terms of contemplations and this extends out into the history and social plight of Sephardic Jews, the confusing interaction with Islam ("In Judaism he's Muslim, because his mother was Muslim. According to Islam he's Jewish because his father is Jewish."), the fundamental interface between male/female and the ultimate meaning of life/death. As signature elements of the author's style, confusion, uncertainty and disorientation permeate throughout so his message(s) are sensed rather than explicitly read.
That is fine but, having previously read another of his books- The Expelled, I found Gates To Tangier to be disappointingly dry in comparison. It was very hard to get excited about the mundane and rather ill-defined storyline and even more so about the mental meanderings of the characters, in spite of some nice twists here and there. As a result, the autobiographical aspect which frequently appears in his writing also became far more prominent and overwhelming than was probably intended, and I found myself wondering why he hadn't just written an actual autobiography instead.
In summary, while Gates To Tangiers is intelligently written (although very poorly edited in some places) and gives the reader plenty of food for thought on various existential questions, some much-needed humour is definitely lacking and the storyline is too lightweight in conventional terms to compensate for that absence. Although generally appreciative of Benarroch's style, for the reasons just outlined, I nevertheless have to rate this particular work at 2 out of 4 stars.
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Gates to Tangier
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I definitely preferred The Expelled to this one- the fantasy & humour was just on a higher plain there.
