The book:
February’s Shelf Improvement comes from Tahar Ben Jelloun, one of Morocco’s most celebrated and prolific authors. The Happy Marriage is a brilliant take on a broken marriage, going beyond the outwardly simple theme by expressing and inspecting the perspective of both husband and wife individually.
Our narrator is the husband, a painter in Casablanca, who has been paralyzed by a stroke at the very height of his career and, convinced that his marriage is the sole reason for his decline, he finds escape in writing a book about their union. We learn all of their 20-year relationship, filled with the obstacles faced; their different backgrounds, her character flaws, his infidelity. In a dramatic turn, we are then given the retort from the wife. Her incisive reaction to his version of the story provides a vastly different picture of the marriage, forcing questions about the original narrator’s reliability and self-image.
A thoughtful and politically-aware writer, Ben Jelloum’s skilfully assembled novel – translated fluidly by André Naffis-Sahely – provokes questions about equality within marriage and the clash between patriarchy and feminism. We hope you enjoy your book this month.
What the Guardian thought:
Our protagonist is semi-paralysed, recovering from a stroke, his face twisted. He is a successful artist who counts Delacroix and Buñuel among his mental companions, a demanding perfectionist who now struggles to move his fingers while watching athletics on TV. His musings on deterioration and dependency – “When your life is in someone else’s hands, is it still a life?” – form the backdrop to his memories of a two-decade marriage, experienced in Paris and Casablanca, in sickness and health.
Jelloun skilfully represents the shifting emotional terrain of long-term relationships, pointing out the fatal momentum of early mistakes. The artist believes love can overcome impossible obstacles, yet on his wedding day fails to defend his wife from his aunt’s snobbish onslaught. The reader, of course, feels pity. The artist’s wife appears jealous of his success, possessive, manipulative, superstitious, paranoid-aggressive and intellectually inferior. The circumstances seem to mitigate somewhat his many extramarital affairs. His descriptions of remembered lovers are jewelled vignettes – every walk-on character in this novel is idiosyncratic, fully historied and alive.
Then we get the counternarrative, from the wife, who at last is granted a name: Amina. She calls the artist Foulane, which means “anybody”. Unlike her husband, she is “not writing a novel”. Her words fill less than a third of the book. The first-person sentences are more direct, but no less intelligent. Her narrative shows that the artist’s self-perception as a liberal does not translate into lived behaviour. Foulane is dominating, intimidating and cruelly inattentive. “I had to dwell in his shadow and cower in it,” she reports. His adulteries are compulsive and casual, and her marriage becomes a “certificate of my slavery, confinement and humiliation”.
Amina isn’t entirely reliable, either. Though the book ends with an unsettling redemption, she is proudly vindictive and trapped like her husband in solipsism. Both husband and wife portray their children – otherwise absent from the story – as siding with them. The Happy Marriage is a novel of class and gender politics, but more significantly, of interrogated perspective. As well as pinning down the strains and lonelinesses of the (un)shared life, Jelloun forces reflection on the nature of narration, judgment and belief. This is an accomplished, provocative and very enjoyable novel.
Robin Yassin-Kassab - Read the full review
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