The Happy Marriage
Tahar Ben Jelloun
[Melville House]
There are two sides to every story, and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Tahar Ben Jelloun manages to tell both in The Happy Marriage, an uncompromising exposé of a marriage gone terribly awry. Exquisitely translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely, the novel juxtaposes a husband’s lengthy list of grievances with the point-by-point rebuttal of his wife, creating the sort of affective aporia all too familiar to anyone who has experienced the collapse of a relationship. The husband, a celebrated painter paralysed by a stroke, holds his wife responsible for his untimely incapacitation; she, as he recounts, believes him “a monster, a pervert, a miserable husband, a shit father, and a cheat”. There are echoes of Tolstoy: the gulf between partners seems impassable.
And yet, Jelloun manages to bridge the gap, deftly drawing readers into the innermost chambers of a marriage that once aspired to reach across the twin chasms of class and culture in deeply divided Morocco. The painter’s memories are illustrated with allusions “right out of the pages of Nabokov or Pushkin”; with the singular narcissism of the artist, he fills his life with writers, painters, and those he considers his intellectual equals. An incorrigible (and unapologetic) womaniser, even his conquests are brilliant, cultured women whom he contrasts with his wife, an impetuous Berber woman from a family of “peasants that couldn’t even speak Arabic that well”. Amina, for her part, is quick to admit that she’s “not formally educated”, but her education of hunger and hardship has taught her what seems to elude her worldly husband: “very early in life [she] understood that life isn’t an endless series of dinner parties”. Where the painter’s recriminations are long-winded and self-aggrandising, Amina’s rejoinders are rapid, pulsating, and rough. Jelloun adroitly pulls off the dual narrator structure. Although the violence of Amina’s words and thoughts convey her desire for revenge, the painter’s fate is more surprising – and more cruel, perhaps – than even he would have suspected.
Words: Mònica Tomàs White
