92 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2018 Mahi Binebine. Le fou du roi. Paris. Stock. 2017. 167 pages. Writer, painter, and sculptor Mahi Binebine is the first and only Moroccan artist to have his works included in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The sixth child of his family, Binebine was born in 1959 in Marrakech, the Ochre City, to a mother who worked as a secretary and a father who was a teacher. Lefouduroi(Thecourtjester),Binebine’s tenth novel, merges the author’s family tragedy and the national history of Morocco. Binebine’s narrative tells the story of his father, who served for thirty-five years as a sort of court jester and trusted companion of King Hassan II, and his brother, a young military officer involved in 1971’s Skhirat coup d’état. The almost Shakespearean scene of an armed officer entering the palace where his father is accompanying the king aptly depicts the deep divisions within Moroccan society during the so-called Years of Lead (1971–99). The son represents the many young officers who protested the rule of the monarch during the second half of the twentieth century and who, as a result, spent long years of incarceration in the mouroir of Tazmamart. In previous novels, Binebine, who was personally affected by this dark past given his family’s own involvement with it, often took the side of his brother, who was openly repudiated by his father and imprisoned for two decades. Yet in this novel, which could be read as a text of reconciliation, Binebine allows his father to tell his version of the story, to voice his complex feelings about being a father and a loyal courtier. Le fou du roi is a narrative that expresses the affectionate, almost carnal relationship binding the courtier and his ailing king. While many novels, biographies, and autobiographies of the twenty-first century recount the sordid memory of the mass incarcerations of the last century, Binebine’s novel stands out as a personal narrative of a father-son opposition at the very heart of political power. This familial confrontation is expressed through a series of binaries structuring the text: tragedy and comedy, love and hate, peace and violence, hope and despair. Ultimately, Binebine’s novel uses personal memory as the site from which to World Literature in Review WORLDLIT.ORG 93 write the Moroccan collective memory of the Years of Lead during the reign of Hassan II. Nisrine Slitine El Mghari University of Oklahoma Jorge Carrión. Bookshops: A Reader’s History. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2017. 304 pages. Jorge Carrión begins this paean to bookshops by writing: “Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world.” This axiomatic declaration is important as it establishes the metaphor around which the book is constructed, which Carrión expounds shortly after: “You need no passport to gain entry to the cartography of a bookshop , to its representation of the world—of the many worlds we call world—that is so much like a map, that sphere of freedom where times slows down and tourism turns into another kind of reading.” The director of the master’s program in creative writing at Barcelona’s Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Carrión is the author of three novels as well as numerous travel books and collections of essays. Librerías, translated as Bookshops (the English edition carries the subtitle A Reader’s History, not present in the Spanish), was a finalist for the Anagrama Essay Prize in 2013. It is the first of Carrión’s books to be translated into English. In the chapter “Bookshops Fated to Be Political,” Carrión moves between Hitler’s Germany to Cold War Berlin and, not surprisingly, to Cuba, to discuss the role bookshops have played in fomenting and propping up totalitarian regimes. As a frequent visitor to Havana, this was of particular interest to me. He writes: “It was in the Communist bookshop on calle Carlos III in Havana that future commander and repressor Fidel Castro bought the two key books in his life: The Communist Manifesto and The State and Revolution.” While the bookshops on calle Obispo remain (La...