On the day of his father's funeral, Abdel Nasser kicked the imam in the face while the imam was standing over the grave, waiting to receive the body. Almost everyone condemned the young man although some people tried to find an explanation in his grief.

That's how Shukri Mabkhout opens his novel. But that ends up being almost the end of the story he wants to tell us because once the outrage is explored, the novel goes back in order to show us why that happened. Abdel Nasser remains the center of the story but the novel grows around it and turned into a novel of political upheaval and changes in Tunisia. Considering when it was written, one may expect this to be a novel of the Arab Spring but it is not - the funeral is in the summer of 1990 and the political upheaval is the 1987 coup d'état which brought Ben Ali to power (the man who will get toppled by the Arab Spring in 2011).

While the story goes back to Abdel Nasser's childhood, it does not spend a lot of time there - the bulk of the novel is set in the mid- and late-1980s when our protagonist is first a student (and left wing organizer) and then a journalist. By him being there in those years, the novel turns into a novel of Tunisia in the middle of a change. I had to wonder how much of that novel is based on real events and people - Abdel Nasser is born in 1960; the author was born in 1962 and he would have been in Tunis at the times depicted in the novel. It is irrelevant for the story - even if everything is invented, an author's life always influences what he writes.

Tunisia of the 1980s is a divided country - between Tunis and the rest of the country; between the Islamists and the Left; between the conservatives and the ones who want the country to change. In the middle of that, we have Abdel Nasser (or as he is called by most people El-Talyani (The Italian) - based on his Italian looks) - a man who grew up without needing anything, in a house full of sisters and in the shadow of an older brother who left the country when Abdel Nasser was six, studied and then made a career in Europe and rarely returns (but sends money to his younger brother - one would wonder if that was an apology for not being there).

The narrator of the novel is a friend of Abdel Nasser - a man who occasionally switched to the first person but keeps to the third for most of the novel; for most of the novel, it feels like there is a second narrator who sees everything but later it becomes somewhat clear that we have just one - he just hears the stories he is relaying. And yet, the question of the narrator lingers - because if it is a friend, then we may have an unreliable narrator and things may be a bit different in reality; if we have a secondary narrator, there may be more objectivity.

And then there is the love story. We know it will fail - when we first met Abdel Nasser, we were told that he was divorced. But we get to see him meeting the woman who he will divorce for the first time and we get to see how the love blossoms and then dies. One wonders if it really blossomed or if it got cut too early though - neither him, nor Zeina seem to care enough to salvage their love... or not at the same time anyway.

There is a lot of moral ambiguity in the novel - noone is just good or just bad. Friendships and love often gets sidelined in the pursuit of something else. The rise of the radical Islamism which will engulf the world a few decades later seems almost as a background issue here, one which you would almost ignore if you did not know what is to come later - even if Tunisia never really got the really bad brand of it, the elements for it were there.

I'd admit that I don't know much about Tunisian history. That novel has some of it - and it made me curious about the rest. But despite being a novel of Tunisia, it is mostly a novel about a man who tries to find his place - a man who has his vices but who tries to be honest with himself (even he fails in that occasionally). I found myself reading a lot longer than I planned to on the day I started the novel - the book draws you in, even if you know where it will lead.

The translators added a dictionary for most of the terms they did not translate but chose not to add notes for cultural and historical references. They all make sense in a context but I do wonder if I missed some of the meaning of some of them by not knowing the reference. But that is a risk you always need to accept when reading a novel about a novel set in a culture which is so very different from any culture you ever lived in.

The novel won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2015. I've read another winner of the same award - the one which won the year before [Frankenstein in Baghdad]. And in both of them you got a very Arabian novel but without it being too foreign and impossible to understand from outside. Awards can be tricky sometimes but this one seems to be in sync with what I like so I may look at what else got nominated for it (and is translated into a language I can read).

I really enjoyed this novel despite getting occasionally annoyed by its verbosity. It fits the novel, it fits its style (although I could have lived without the sex scenes - they are not vulgar or disturbing (or numerous), if anything their prose reads like an Arabic poem more than anything else but the author tends to get a bit carried away in them and carries his metaphors a bit too long). It may not work for everyone but I'd still recommend it. ( )

“L’Italiano” che dà il titolo a questo bel romanzo di autore tunisino, tradotto dall’arabo da Barbara Teresi (e che nel 2015 si è visto assegnare il Premio internazionale per la narrativa araba), è un giovane né italiano né emigrato nel nostro Paese. Il suo soprannome è dovuto al fascinoso aspetto fisico che, a detta della sua cerchia di amici e conoscenti, è molto… latino. E in effetti le donne non restano insensibili alla sua presenza. Anche Zeina, che sarà per un paio d’anni sua moglie, è una bellezza berbera fuori del comune. Ma il libro non è certo un romanzo rosa (anche se non fanno difetto le pagine dedicate a queste vicende, fino a scene quasi hard). Riprende anzi un tratto di storia tunisina, quella dell’ultimo decennio circa di Bourghiba al potere e dell’avvento di Ben Ali, tenendo sempre assieme la dimensione privata e quella pubblica – sociale e politica. Una sorta di “meglio gioventù” maghrebina, preparata, brillante, combattiva, ma anche confusa e che finisce, di fatto, per essere irrilevante nel corso degli eventi.
Perché Abdel Nasser, “l’Italiano”, classe 1960, è un leader studentesco carismatico, di convincimenti marxisti ma refrattario alla «violenza rivoluzionaria» sostenuta da altri (come il più anziano e tenebroso avvocato). Zeina, da parte sua, vorace e intelligente lettrice fin da bambina, ha una cultura e una personalità non comuni, è «una dei pochi in grado di criticare gli studenti islamisti della Tendenza islamica, con i quali discuteva delle questioni relative al loro campo d’elezione, ovvero l’identità islamica».
Da correttore di bozze, Abdel Nasser diverrà giornalista e, paradossalmente, in un quotidiano filogovernativo, ma senza piegarsi ai compromessi. Zeina scomparirà dalla scena del suo Paese, e in un modo che non ci saremmo aspettati. Ma attorno a loro e tra di loro c’è tutto un universo – familiare, studentesco, sociale, politico – con molti personaggi e anche molti passaggi di sapore esplicativo (sull’evoluzione del Paese), ma che riescono a non essere pedanti, poiché usciti dalla bocca dei protagonisti o da quella dell’io narrante, un anonimo e discreto amico di Zeina come pure dell’Italiano. È la figura che forse finiamo per amare di più. Perché gli eroi del romanzo non sono eroi… a tempo pieno. Il lettore ora vi si affezionerà, ora farà un passo indietro, sconcertato da certe scelte che possono essere viste come contraddittorie.
Ma perché fermarsi al 1990 e non venire all’oggi, alla Rivoluzione dei Gelsomini? L’autore – che è rettore di università nonché direttore della Fiera del Libro di Tunisi e molto altro ancora, e anch’egli attivo, in gioventù, nel movimento studentesco, affine forse più a Zeina che ad “Abdo” – sostiene che per comprendere la “primavera” del 2011 occorre saper guardare indietro, specialmente al periodo in cui "L’Italiano" è ambientato, perché, dice, «la storia della Tunisia ha avuto un’evoluzione a spirale, senza rotture».
Oggi, ripensando al passato, al-Mabkhout sottolinea, nelle interviste che rilascia, l’importanza «filosofica» del corpo (che infatti nel suo romanzo, censurato in alcuni Paesi arabi, emerge con prepotenza). Nel senso che «Bourghiba ha, sì, fatto saltare la struttura sociale arcaica spazzando via il concetto di tribalismo e instaurando quello di famiglia» (il Codice della Famiglia, lo ricordiamo, precedette addirittura l’adozione della Costituzione della Tunisia indipendente), ma poi «nemmeno la sinistra ha capito che la sfida è l’individuo e la libertà individuale» (e tanto meno le forze islamiste). «Si può forse fare la rivoluzione, cambiare la società, con individui che non sono liberi?». E la domanda, secondo l’autore, rimane valida, a dispetto del sostanziale buon esito, anche per la Rivoluzione dei Gelsomini…