The books of Mois Benarroch: Review -- The Expelled by Mois Benarroch

Review by Sgatev23 -- The Expelled by Mois Benarroch

Mois Benarroch, an award-winning poet and novelist (Amichai Prize, Prime Minister Prize), is an author of more than twenty books. His short novel, The Expelled, is part of a compendium of seven novels under the name Amor y Exilios (Love and Exile).

This remarkable novella relates the story of a writer who falls in love with a young woman, Gabrielle, whose name and appearance are exactly like his wife’s, only she is twenty-five years younger. A question arises whether they are the same person or not. The mysterious event shapes a narrative which reveals vivid features immanent to magic realism, or, more accurately, to metafiction, genres that reject any of the conventional rules imposed by traditional modernism. It is not long before the reader is forced to consider the story not only as a creative product but as a creative process. As the unnamed writer admits:

“It could very well be the pure imagination of a writer, an idea to write a novel or a story, although I am not very good at writing short stories, I need more words. It must have been just that, one should not play with coincidences or imagination.”

The overt romance, then, quickly fades away when both characters enter the fictive world of the writer-protagonist’s short novel. There, the kidnapping of a bus slowly shapes itself into an allegory of the problematic relationship between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. The bus is separated between the ‘back’ people and the ‘front’ people, and those adjectives, at first only terms used for better accuracy, soon become vividly emblematic of social classes and ethnic groups. In the aftermath of this event, while the central plot is seeking to find out who gunned down Cash, one of the ‘back’ people in the bus, the passengers recount their individual stories about that time when they were all together “between two seas, two worlds.” But whom to?

The self-reflexivity of the novel becomes ever more apparent when the main protagonist’s soliloquy is interrupted by his mysterious interrogators.

“Well, I see that in here I'm going to be talking alone and nobody is going to respond to anything. I don't even know if you're listening, maybe you've fallen asleep, or there's just one of you, or you're recording this and then you'll listen to only parts of what I say.”

This narrative bifurcation befuddles the reader as he sinks deeper and deeper into these metafictional layers and, at the same time, is invited by the very character to take his active role in interpreting the events (“… if I write our encounter one day it'll be a story in which someone tells a story about someone who's telling a story.”).

The Expelled is one of those literary gems with quantum-like properties which deem any genre categorization impossible. Apart from some minor editorial imperfections, a solid 3 out of 4 is what any perceptive reader would rate this brilliant piece of writing. Benarroch’s flouted play with fiction and reality gains him a well-deserved place right next to Wells, Fowles, and Borges.

******
The Expelled
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes