The Sacred Night by Tahar Ben Jelloun
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

La nuite sacrée, The Sacred Night – the night of purge, the night of truth, the night of rebirth. With this night, the 27th one of Ramadan, starts the Tahar Ben Jelloun’s book: a very promising beginning. But what is next is just … disappointing. It is a tale about the role of woman in the Islamic world as a dark, dense, intricate, surrealistic, and almost unbearable story. It is not only the mix between reality and hallucinations that disturbs, but also the blending of poetry and violence, and especially that heavy eroticism. Sex is abused in this book. It is used as a measure of control, lie, freedom, love and desire, hate and revenge. And if Zahra may spiritually have won the right to her feminity, she still remained a slave from the sexual point of view. And this is only half of freedom.
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