''A Life Full of Holes'' is the autobiography of Moroccan story teller

Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi Driss ben Hamed Charhadi (1937–1986) is the alias for Larbi Layachi, a Moroccan story-teller, some of whose stories have been translated by Paul Bowles from Moroccan Arabic to English. His book, '' A Life Full of Holes'' was tape-recorded and tr ...

, as told to and translated by

Paul Bowles Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his ...

(from Charhadi's

Maghrebi Arabic Maghrebi Arabic (, Western Arabic; as opposed to Eastern or Mashriqi Arabic) is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb region, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Western Sahara, and Mauritania. It includes Moroccan, Alger ...

), and published in 1964. Charhadi became an acquaintance of Bowles, an American writer and traveler, in

Tangier Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the cap ...

. He convinced Bowles that he had an interesting life story to tell; in turn, Bowles taped, edited, transcribed, and published the account after first publishing a few of Charhadi's anecdotes, which met with success. Bowles called Charhadi's account a "novel"; later, he explained that this was done at the behest of the publisher, in order to qualify it for some literary prize. A contemporary reviewer named "B. H.", in '' Prairie Schooner'', called the book unsuccessful as a novel, criticizing its language and narrative structure, which it deemed "simple". B. H. claimed that the narrator did not seem to be aware of himself and his own life: "The narrator seems unaware of possible relationships between past and present, between contemporaneous events, and between his life and events in the world around him"--the book's value is limited to "provid ngilluminating insights into primitivistic habits of mind". Mary Martin Rountree, in an article discussing the entirety of Bowles's work in translating Maghrebi stories, said it was an "altogether astonishing feat of sustained storytelling", and cites from the introduction, with approbation: "Bowles accurately singles out Charhadi's gifts in his introduction to ''A Life Full of Holes'': 'The good storyteller keeps the thread of his narrative almost taut at all points. This Charhadi accomplished, apparently effort. He never hesitated; he never varied the intensity eloquence'".

References

1964 Moroccan novels {{Africa-novel-stub

See also

References