Book: Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Picked this book up at the Virgin Store in the Beirut airport while I was waiting for a connection flight. It is an easy read and I got through the entire book on my long flight.


It deals with a brother and sister who emigrate from Morocco to Barcelona. The brother basically catches the eye of a gay Spaniard named Miguel who goes to Morocco often for leisure and business. He creates a pseudo-job for the brother, who I think is called Azel (?), provided he live with him in Barcelona, be his lover and basically be at his beck and call.

Meanwhile, the brother convinces Miguel to marry his sister so that she may also come to Spain, which Miguel does, although there are no romantic feelings between the sister and the Spaniard. In the end, what the story highlights on are how different people deal with emigration into a foreign land, who ruins themselves in the process and who paves out opportunities for themselves. I wished that the story had created more dialogue between the three characters to show their interaction in greater depth, but in the end it was a page turner.

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