{"id":744,"date":"2010-04-02T14:29:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T13:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=744"},"modified":"2016-01-23T20:08:55","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T19:08:55","slug":"laila-lalami-secret-son-penguin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=744","title":{"rendered":"Laila Lalami, <em>Secret Son<\/em> (Penguin) \u00a39.99"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lalami\u2019s<i> Secret Son,<\/i> long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel.\u00a0 Set in Lalami\u2019s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that clich\u00e9 \u2018Write about what you know\u2019, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef.\u00a0 He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that his father had died in an accident.\u00a0 But he finds out fairly soon in the book that his father is alive and wealthy in another part of town with a wife and a daughter who\u2019s studying in America.\u00a0 Youssef makes contact with this father, Nabil Amrani, at a moment when Nabil is disillusioned with the daughter who seems to have left her family and roots behind, and taken up with an American boy friend.\u00a0 Nabil takes the boy up, installs him in his spare apartment and finds him a job in his company.\u00a0 At that point, his daughter, Amal, returns and reclaims her father\u2019s attention.\u00a0 From that point on, events for Youssef take a much darker, tragic turn.<\/p>\n<p>At first, the novel seems be centred on the two men, and a cast of other males who are portrayed as either dissolute or dangerous, or both.\u00a0 The need for a father\/son bond is rendered in a slightly clich\u00e9d way, initially centripetal but later centrifugal.\u00a0 But the characters of both son and father are believably depicted.\u00a0 Later, the characters of the women in the book, the mother, Rachida, Nabil\u2019s wife and daughter, Amal, move more into focus, and that is subtly and powerfully done, particularly Nabil\u2019s wife whom we don\u2019t actually meet.<\/p>\n<p>There is a nod to post-modernism in this book when two of the central interviews, between father and son, and Rachida and Amal are repeated from the point of view of each of the protagonists. Perhaps a more confident novelist would not have needed this; the differences between the two versions seem, to my way of thinking, fairly minimal.\u00a0 However, the atmosphere of poverty and riches in contemporary Casablanca is very strong. And the final quarter of the book where the politics of the book become more focused in the surface of the writing is genuinely gripping;\u00a0 Lalami has made Youssef a rounded and engaging character whose fate the reader genuinely cares about.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lalami\u2019s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel.\u00a0 Set in Lalami\u2019s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that clich\u00e9 \u2018Write about what you know\u2019, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef.\u00a0 He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[152,224,276],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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