The Big Mirror

Of all the third-world writers Paul Bowles translated, Mohammed Mrabet enjoyed the most success-- perhaps because he managed to stay on Bowles' good side the longest. But Mrabet also has an amazingly fertile imagination that surpassed Bowles' at times. He can seemlessly incorporate elements of Western narrative innovations into his work, as he proves with The Big Mirror. Much like Mrabet's other novels and collections of stories, it's a portrait of Morocco in the 60's and 70's that's grounded in ancient ritual and myth, but in this case Mrabet seems to have tackled feelings of doom and anxiety and horror much more openly than ever before. This is the most "Western" of Mrabet's work, I would say, and perhaps also the most powerful because it so clearly walks the tightrope between cultures, between times, between logic and the inexplicable, between brutality and love. It's chilling and surreal as Jim Thompson's novel Savage Night or the juicy parts of Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. I'm telling you, track this one down.