On the Italian

Choukri Mabkhout’s The Italian is an absolutely fascinating novel. It took me a while to get into, but by the end of the first act I couldn’t put it down. It’s effectively a character study of its protagonist, Abdel Nasser, called “el-Talyani,” the Italian. The story opens at the end: at his father’s funeral, Abdel Nasser beats the hell out of a neighbor, an imam, and the narrator — ostensibly a friend of his and of his future wife — sets out to understand what led him to scandalize his friends, family, and neighbors this way. And, as the saying goes, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe, so we go all the way back to his childhood. As the novel unfolds we get absorbed in his story — I sometimes forgot the narrative even connected back to the funeral — but Mabkhout keeps dropping little hints and clues to draw us back there, which turns the whole thing into a kind of mystery, working out which events connect to which and discarding the red herrings.

The novel’s great strength is that it works on so many levels at once: it’s about love and romance, it’s a political novel about the transformation of a country, it’s a bildungsroman, and — without giving too much away — it’s something darker still. In other words, it’s a book about trauma in all its guises: familial, romantic, sexual, political. I was also captivated by the setting. I’ve read extensively about Tunisia in the colonial period, the early Bourguiba era, and the Revolution, but this book deals with a moment I don’t think has been properly discussed in the scholarly literature, especially the Anglophone literature: the transition from the founding father Habib Bourguiba to Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who would be ousted in the 2011 Revolution. The bulk of it spans a few years on either side of November 7th, 1987, and the shift from the second to the third act falls precisely on the night between the 6th and the 7th. We see student battles between Islamists and leftists, police brutality, a puerile and dithering “liberalization,” intense corruption, and the challenges of journalism in such a time. Zeina’s character especially resonated with me — her tendency to neglect every other part of her life in pursuit of academic achievement. I’ve been there, and if I don’t keep it in check I can “vanish” from everything in the world for the need to read and write.

The weakest part is the depiction of gender relations. There’s something of a fantasy in the way Mabkhout paints them: Abdel Nasser is the sexiest, most handsome man alive, free to sleep with whomever he likes; Zeina is the progressive intellectual Berber warrior with her own troubles, Najla the gorgeous volleyball player, Jweeda the MILF next door, Reem the unattainable virgin who can be conquered but mustn’t be. Some of the Arabic-language reviews complain that the book is pornographic, or borderline so; it isn’t. There’s a lot of sex, and it can feel gratuitous, but I think it serves a real purpose, connecting back to Freud’s compulsion to repeat. The book is about trauma, and many of its characters repeat what’s wrong for them over and over, traumatized without realizing how deep the trauma runs — seeking, rather than the pleasure principle, their own dissolution through Thanatos. I suspect I’ll be recommending this one to a lot of people: it’s powerful, remarkably literary, and it holds together well.