Your remarks on the novel’s adoption of the halqa form are especially fascinating. Hamid’s rejection of his tragic role allows both the character and his creator to escape from a pernicious cycle: Hamid has been forced to kill Djamila every night, just as the other writers whom you describe have been led to recycle the same ending again and again. Suddenly both cycles are disrupted by the appearance of the halqa–or, as you point out, the “circle”–which creates new intimacy and self-consciousness within the novel’s audience. There seems to me to be something peculiarly satisfying and suggestive about this rejection of one circle in favor of another.

Reading about inconclusive endings also reminded me of Driss Chraibi’s wonderful Le Passé Simple where the main protagonist migrates to France at the end of the novel. That, too, might be considered a form of ’subversion’, especially as it was written on the cusp of Moroccan independence. Perhaps there is a parallel between emigration and death - in this case the death of the two characters in Mamouni’s novel?

Emile Chabal
(PhD candidate in history, Cambridge University)