To Write on Tamara?

As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel Bnabous book is at once a memoir and a novel, a confession and a reflection on the prerogatives and imperatives of writing ones story. At its center, forever alluring and elusive, is the beautiful and ethereal Tamara, the exact incarnation of our narrators most enduring fantasya femme fatale for the lover of form. Who precisely our narrator is, is less certain: The young Manuel, who leaves his home in Morocco to study in Paris, only to encounter the enticing Tamara? Or the mature Manuel, looking back not only at Tamara but also at the younger mans reading of his experience through the pages of the literature of sentimental apprenticeship, from Stendhals The Red and the Black through Flauberts Sentimental Education? A heady, genre-defying high-wire act by a writer who delights in such undertakings and whose efforts consistently delight readers worldwide, To Write on Tamara? captures with graceful authority and assurance the now thrilling, now vexing complexities of living and writing lifes stories, especially stories of love.