ENDLESS FALL

Haunted by the suicide of a classmate decades prior, a Moroccan author offers an elegant “little chronicle” as a proper lament for the young man.

In the 1960s (exact date not specified), the suicide of a popular high school junior shocked the small Moroccan town of Settat, “still nothing more than a tiny village dozing like a lizard under an unchanging blue, sunlit sky.” Seemingly out of nowhere, Khalid left his history class, a brief suicide note scribbled on the desk, and jumped to his death over a fourth-floor railing into the courtyard below. For Leftah (1946-2008), who wrote 10 novels during his career, Khalid became a “sleeper of the valley,” after a poem by Rimbaud. In brief, cryptic segments, the author attempts to establish a sequence to the events, emphasizing detail that has become excruciatingly seared in his memory: Khalid’s right arm in a sling that day as they climbed the stairs to class; the history professor, “alcoholic, intemperate, and decadent Mr. Ciccion,” who was chosen as the “messenger” for the laconic suicide note asking forgiveness of Khalid’s mother and wishing “eternal happiness” to a fellow student; and the Arabic teacher at school, who became the dead boy’s punishing “obituarist,” condemning the suicide according to Koranic verses. Leftah is compassionate in his excavation of the horror surrounding Khalid’s death, and he speculates about the boy’s motive—perhaps a transgressive love for a beautiful fellow soccer player? The author makes these remnants of memory shine like talismans. “I linked these items and writings with scraps, diversions and ruptures, rage and love, to dissolve a rhetoric, a writing, a calligraphic shroud,” he writes. The book was first published in France in 2008.

A moving, startling, enigmatic work of memory and loss that feels as fresh as when it was written.