1 out of 4 stars
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The Expelled, by Mois Benarroch is a work of meta-fiction that only loosely fits into the genre of a sci-fi or fantasy series. It is a fairly short read of only about 170 pages and is available on Amazon for $2.84 (e-book)
The book starts with the narrator describing his woes as a penniless writer who thinks his wife is contemplating divorce. At a bus-stop he sees a woman who looks exactly like his wife from thirty years ago. He talks to her, and so begins an affair between the narrator and wife-younger. As the story continues, he reads to her from one of his novels and we enter the world of a surreal bus ride, where an argument over using the restroom or the ‘can’ as it is referred to leads to a hierarchy within the bus of ‘front people’ who sit at the front of the bus, and the ‘back people’. The front people, who form the majority, control access to the ‘can’ and only allow the back people to use it for a couple of hours a day. The back people show barely any resistance and come to accept these arrangements. After a variety of surreal incidents, we find ourselves delving into a story within a notebook of one of the passengers of the bus.
The author of this is a Sephardi Jew from Morocco and he discusses the struggles and the oppression of his community by the Ashkenazi Jews in Israel. He discusses his heritage and his youth in Israel, where he was considered an outsider, one of the ‘expelled’ even when he tries to disavow his Moroccan heritage. Later, when he embraces his heritage he is considered racist for even suggesting that he is the victim of racism. Here finally we arrive at the overarching theme of the book. The plight of the Sephardi Jews is mentioned in passing in the first story, and the oppression of the ‘back people’ in the bus serves as a metaphor for the oppression of the Sephardi by the Ashkenazi. Together with the story in the notebook, it becomes apparent that the aim of the book is to illustrate the condition of this sect of Judaism.
As anyone can see, this book is pretty complicated and for any reader who prefers a straight-forward story, that does not require unraveling, would certainly not like this book. Moreover, the sci-fi and fantasy tag most likely comes from the variety of surreal events, which are never properly explained. Readers looking for elaborate constructions of either sci-fi or fantasy should look elsewhere.
While I liked the concept of stories within stories, and even liked the way in which this author pulled of meta-fiction by having the narrator talk about how this would be the book that would establish him as an author, there were far too many disappointments with this book. First of all, considering the amount of effort that the author, Mois Benarroch, puts into weaving a complicated tale, I was surprised and disappointed that the metaphors were beaten over the reader’s head without even an attempt at subtlety. I enjoy well-written metaphors, and while there were several which had potential, the feeling of having them shoved down my throat ruined them for me. Perhaps the author gave himself too much credit about how hard his metaphors were to grasp, or perhaps some readers would like the metaphors laid bare. For me, this was a major problem with the book and the writing style. My other major complaint is the sheer lack of variation in the style of narration, despite the narrator changing several times. This made large parts of the book feel dreary and dry, especially at points when the plot was not progressing.
There were a couple of other issues that I had, but they were annoyances as opposed to outright problems. One such is the infrequent identification of the speaker in conversations involving multiple people. Combined with the problem of no character having a particularly unique voice, this made the book hard to follow occasionally. Finally, there are several allusions to songs and artists which was not well written into the story, which made them seem like forced. This happened often enough that I was slightly annoyed by this. As I said, these are minor annoyances and do not detract from the book significantly.
If my review ended here, my rating would be two stars out of four. I was not a fan of the book, but there are redeeming qualities that fans of surrealism in writing and meta-fiction would enjoy. However, this book is a translation from a Spanish book, and because of the manner of the translation, there is a whole new batch of concerns. While there are only a few grammatical errors, the quality of the translation leaves much to be desired since the book has not been tailored to English. By this I mean that sentence structures have remained the same as the original Spanish whenever there are no mistakes. This makes for long awkward sentences with far too many commas such as
Moreover, as one can see, the phrasing feels extremely awkward which is jarring and affects readability. A good part of the enjoyment of the book, is thus unfortunately lost in translation.Waiting for my turn to pass my bag through the machine that was looking for bombs, I lost her from my sight, I thought forever. It could very well be the pure imagination of a writer, an idea to write a novel or a story, although I am not very good at writing short stories, I need more words.
As a result of all of this, I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars. However, with editing and a better effort at translation, a more cogent narrative is certainly possible, as this book has the potential for much better ratings.
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The Expelled
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