THE GAME OF FORGETTING

The Game of Forgetting ($10.95 paperback original; June 1996; 150 pp.; 0-292-70845-9). Subtitled ``A Novelistic Text,'' this densely layered portrait of family life in 1950s Morocco employs multiple narrators, alternative beginnings, and other self-reflexive and postmodernist techniques to depict its protagonist, the young intellectual Hadi, very specifically as a product of his unstable culture and in his conflicted relations with the members of his large extended family—all of whom are viewed as having contributed crucially to the formation of what might be called his polyglot personality. Both as theory and as story, a wise, humane, and deeply involving work.