The Offering by Salah el Moncef
Should a book ever win a prize for its unreliable narrator, bet on The Offering (Penelope Books) by Salah el Moncef. The narrator in question is Tariq Abbassi, a lapsed Muslim who leaves Tunisia to study philosophy at the Sorbonne but ends up running a successful Middle Eastern restaurant in Bordeaux while aspiring to be a poet. Who better than a poet to spin a twisty tale of mysteries within mysteries?
MASTERFUL PROSE EXPLORES CREATIVITY
The book begins as Tariq, his two young sons and his close friend, Zoe, are together in a Paris park, the first day of an autumn vacation. The setting is beautiful, the prose is masterful, and the reader may be forgiven for assuming this little group is happy. Anyone expecting a novel that exalts and explores creativity (as promised in the book’s introduction) will soon find a “gripping detective story of murder, mayhem and mental illness.”
The clues drop quickly. Tariq is divorcing the boys’ mother, Regina, who had previously disappeared unexpectedly with the boys and taken them to her mother’s home in Germany, an event that haunts him still.
“But to come home in the middle of the night and find the apartment half-empty,” he remembers. “To spend three days not knowing where they were — emotionally, I still can’t manage it somehow. It keeps coming back, over and over. It’s creating so much emotional blockage, I can’t even think of writing poetry. That kind of secretive premeditation, that double life she was leading — it’s incomprehensible to me. It has left me with so much unprocessed anger.”
Regina’s actions force Tariq to admit his shortcomings: “Was my total self-involvement the worst of all problems?” he asks himself. Eventually, he wins joint custody of his sons, but his Arab family can’t accept the failure of his marriage.
It’s no spoiler alert to say that the boys will soon die, Tariq will suffer a traumatic brain injury, and as he recovers will discover a vastly different reality, the awareness of which will drive him to suicide. These details are all revealed in the book’s first 10 pages.
MEDITATES ON LOSS, TRAUMA AND REBIRTH
In her introduction, Mari Ruti, distinguished professor of critical theory and cultural, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto, calls the book “a contemplation on the relationship between loss and creativity, trauma and rebirth.
The Offering, one also quickly learns, is a manuscript bequeathed by Tariq to his cook and friend, Sami Mamlouk (and perhaps another unreliable narrator). The manuscript began as Tariq’s diary, expanded by Mamlouk’s discoveries on Tariq’s laptop, including the outline of a novel in progress and a letter from Tariq’s mother. The book thus becomes a story of a story (ultimately, that promised novel of creativity) and what one must “offer” to bring something true and worthwhile into existence.
CAREFULLY WOVEN POETIC THREADS
The novel’s threads range widely: the European immigrant experience of prejudice and inequality; the intricacies of Arab families and the charade of Arab men’s power within them; the struggle of fathers to form bonds with their children; and the promise of new love and its “maze of illusions.”
The final section of the book concerns Tariq’s mental and physical therapy after his brain trauma, and the tricks played by his wounded memory of emotions and events too painful to face. It becomes a novel of forgetting and forgiveness, of a wounded soul sifting reality from delusion.
The author is a native of Kuwait with Tunisian roots; his scholarly works focus on the Arab diaspora experience. This, his second work of fiction, is an intense account of sorrow, sadness and grief as only a poet could tell it.
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