The Voices of Marrakesh; A Record of a Visit

No ordinary travel book, this account of a stay in Marrakesh by one of Europe's major contemporary writers takes the reader on an inward journey that parallels and complements the outward "record of a visit." The city's bewildering medley of voices, reaching out across the barriers of language and culture, recorded with a fidelity both perceptive and discreet, becomes an invitation to confront the realities of life and death. In a series of sharply etched scenes we meet the Arabs, Jews and Europeans who make up the city's population; we stroll through the bazaars and watch people at work; we listen to the storytellers in the Djema el Fna and are set upon by an army of beggars; we get to know a family. We feel, in short, that we are beginning to understand the city, when suddenly all of its strangeness assumes tangible form in one final, challenging enigma.