Television is very educating. Every time somebody turns it on, I go into the other room and read a book.
The succulent's edge. Quayle Street, Sandy Bay. January 2012. This Blinding Absence of Light by the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun is a very dark book, in more ways than one. Its narrative is essentially a reconstruction based on the testimonies of the former inmatse at Tazmamart, a Moroccan secret prison for political prisoners that operated with the harshest of conditions. A hole in the middle of the desert, Tazmamart was a place where prisoners were give us subsistence level of food and water to keep them a live, but deprived them of every aspect of life, including that of light. Thus, we the reader are primarily left with the voice of a solitary prisoner, a voice all the more powerful for being draped in darkness. As one might expect, there is a starkness to the crystalline, pared-down prose. The author certainly rises to the challenge of maintaining interest in such a limited environment and utter hopelessness facing those characters held here. Thus we are treated t...