Celia recommends The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani:

“Would it surprise you if I said that one day I transformed myself into a spider, a weeping willow, and a cyclamen flower?” Ahmed Bouanani asks somewhere in the middle of his novel The Hospital, translated this year by Lara Vergnaud and published by New Directions. “On the whole,” he continues, “we’re talking about a stolen life.” Like a prisoner who, shut inside four walls, invents his own world.

There are books that you’ve never heard of before that, nevertheless, cast a spell of mystery over you once you’ve picked them up, and The Hospital was one of these for me. As soon as I’d finished reading, I wanted to know who Ahmed Bouanani was and why I hadn’t heard of him before. While The Hospital itself is a slim book, it feels as if it reaches out to the hidden network of a life’s work, as vivid and arresting as a long still shot at the beginning of a film. In 1991, Bouanani, known in Morocco as a director, author, and artist, would be called “the memorialist of a cinema without memory,” but by his death in 2011 most of his work was out of print or unfindable, in danger of being forgotten—if it had ever been published at all.

While Bouanani published only rarely during his life—one novel and three books of poetry—his daughter Touda and his friends describe a dozen unpublished works and claim that the published one had to be nearly pried out of his hands. Part of his reticence about publishing may have been political, for after a promising early career as a filmmaker, during which he won international acclaim for The Mirage, he was blacklisted by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, which suspected him of being a communist. Shortly before his death, he confided to a young journalist for the Moroccan weekly magazine TelQuel that he had sometimes given his pieces to others to sign, in order to evade censorship.

Bouanani spent the last years of his life in seclusion, in the remote Moroccan town of Aït Oumghar. A few years earlier, one of his daughters had died. When he moved to Aït Oumghar after her death, a fire caught in the papers stacked in his apartment, and destroyed or damaged a collection of his unpublished manuscripts. In Aït Oumghar, he rarely went outside, and rumors circulated that he was drunk, or ill, or traveling in secret, or already dead.

Based on Bouanani’s own experience of being treated for tuberculosis, The Hospital unfolds in the closed cell of an inpatient ward, where the sick drop in and out of treatment, always tumbling back into the hospital’s enforced stillness, its dreams and frustrations, as the outside world spits them out over and over again. As I was reading, I’d find myself murmuring lines over to myself. Of a dream: “I was able to recognize the different butterflies my naked body attracted like a light: Urania, Vanessa, Bombyx, Argon, Machaon, and Phalene specimens, countless teeming larva and caterpillars.” Of waking: “Light the color of incurable sadness filters through the room’s broken windowpanes.” Of a long-ago memory of killing flies: “I lived like this for a long time, on the margins of a strange childhood, my monstrosity protecting me with its extraordinary warmth.”

It’s a line that, while used to describe the narrator’s own childhood, could easily apply to the younger patients of the hospital as well. Orphans or petty criminals, abandoned by family and society, they reinvent the world outside the hospital in their conversations, which are scatological, sexual, violent—but also convulsively powerful in their vividness, full of a kind of nightmarish play. One boy, called Guzzler, makes a game out of putting the other patients off their food at mealtimes, competing to offer the most revolting descriptions of the food they’re going to eat, of the patients’ various maladies, skin conditions, and scatological complaints. Another, Rover, invents a series of deaths in his family in order to have a night of freedom in the outside world, then returns with his illness to death’s waiting room. Another young man tells a story that explains their lingering existence in the hospital ward thus: the angel of death is a bureaucrat, and they are much too poor to bribe him into doing his job. Both their food and their wine is imaginary. They live on dreams.

The Hospital’s narrator appears to be Bouanani himself. He is writing a novel about the young men on his ward, spinning out the hope that he, at least, will live. They, by turns, mock and entreat him. “Write, for the fun of it, to piss off the world of neckties and hypocrisy,” advises one, and then later, having thought about the question a little more, he clarifies, “Whatever you do, don’t mention my diarrhea, it won’t leave a good impression, and, come on, what will future generations think about a guy like me?” Meanwhile, the narrator compares himself to “those long-ago voyagers who landed on islands on the fringes of the known world; their curiosity dulled quickly when faced with the impenetrable customs of a people hastily judged at first glance to be primitive and savage.” What can you say about the dead and the dying, when you yourself are destined to recover? How can one know which dying vision may turn out to be true?