Salvation Army

I have just read about this author in a magazine. The writer`s review was amazing and that encouraged me to buy it. I realize during the reading that is was a wonderful story, very well narrated. It made me feel in his own skin, and felt all his feelings during the process off coming out. Its a book to read in one week.

As a person who generally loves the memoir genre, I was impressed at how skilled Taia shaped thoughts and stories about his life. At times he was verbose giving every last detail and at other times he leaves the reader without all of the information. Taia artfully sculpts part of his life into a cutting edge novel that spans two theatres--Morroco and Switzerland--and the conflicts deep inside Taia. Taia should be lauded for the authenticity provided in his narrative told through raw stories.

Well, if I give too long of a review there'll be no reason to read the book, as it is very short and I might end up telling the whole story. Should almost be more of a paper than a book. It must have only taken an hour and a half to read it. (glad the library had it too). But I love reading gay stories about men's lives, so this was a must under any circumstance. You really have to hand it to these fellows who live in the Middle East and other 'third world' type countries where this kind of thing (coming out and being out) is not tolerated. They just have indiscriminate sexual encounters. Fortunately Abdelleh was able to leave Morocco and hence able to find himself. And for the most part he had pleasant encounters. And I think he knows it. I enjoyed the book very much.

After the first page, I was transfixed, and easily read the entire book in one setting. It is a simple story, and somewhat-spare prose, but with cadence, voice. Elegant and profound, a work of art, truly an important text. Semiotext(e) was right to take this on.

I came to this book under the spell of Alistair McCartney's persuasive review in a recent issue of LAMBDA BOOK REPORT. (Part of it is reproduced above.) He had me all excited. And then when I got the book I turned to Edmund White's enthusiastic preface and it was even more enthusiastic than what Alistair had written. But nevertheless, when I finally turned to Taia's text I found a different book entirely than the one the two great novelists had described to me. Were we all blind men, and SALVATION ARMY the elephant in the parable? Yea, I think we are. McCartney looks at the book as a version of the coming-out novel that was once a staple of gay writing, given new freshness by its unique setting and, perhaps, by the extreme subject position of its main character. White views it partly as a jeremiad against Western sex tourism. I kept reading through the whole thing and couldn't find either of those books; what I saw was the astonishingly frank story of a young boy who knows his feelings are an offense to society, but who persists in them anyhow. His incestuous love for an older brother--a brother much, much older, a brother old enough nearly to be the boy's father--his delight in the brother's company, in his fruity cologne, his body--is the book's core, and then there's another story tacked onto it about having two affairs with Swiss men, and how cold the Swiss guys are compared to the hot, passionate men of Morocco. But whole sections of the novel seem to have slid off the sides of the page, so that I close the book feeling a hunger for what has been left unsaid, unwritten, or censored, perhaps by the same self that has been so eager to detail the intricacies of Abdelkabir's butt in and out of those sexy black underpants. Frank Stock's translation is pretty amazing, and you feel like you are right there, in Geneva's cold capital, on the hot beaches of North Africa, or wherever Taia chooses to bring you. For me, SALVATION ARMY just needed one more thing, can't tell you what exactly, in order to recommend it to you without reservation.