When a bookshop is an oasis in a desert – Morocco travel diary #3

benjyhg (35)in #books • 7 years ago

For any book lover, coming across a bookshop in an unexpected place can often seem like water in a desert.

Visiting a new independent bookshop and wandering the unfamiliar shelves is always a great way to discover new books and writers.

This is amplified when you’re in country where your first language (or in my case only language) isn’t all that widely spoken.

It was among the bustling, ancient streets of Fez medina that I came across one of my favourite bookshops in the world.

(Pics all mine)

As you can see it’s not a big shop and the majority of its titles are either Arabic or French but it had enough English titles to attract my attention through the crowds. After days wandering streets with Arabic signs familiar English words and writers felt like an island in a sea of words I could not swim in.

Penguin Modern Classics, with their bold images and clean text, always grab me and I was initially drawn to books by the writers I recognised – Arthur Millar, Saul Bellow and Fitzgerald.

What any book lover will know, however, is that much more exciting than browsing shelves of familiar names is discovering new authors. This is where I came across Paul Bowles.

Born in New York state in 1910 Bowles spent most of his life travelling and writing across Europe, North Africa and Central America.

He is particularly connected to the Moroccan city of Tangiers but set his 1955 novel The Spider’s House in Fez.

It was while wandering the streets of this city, which Bowles himself describes in the preface as “a medieval city functioning in the twentieth century,” that I was so drawn to him as a writer.

The book tells of an American ex-pat’s life in the city at a time when Morocco was in the process of breaking free from its French colonial master. The novel wonderfully evokes the mystery and tension still palpable around the medina’s twisting streets today.