{"product_id":"endless-fall-isbn-9781635423020","title":"Endless Fall","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this poignant account of a classmate’s suicide, the acclaimed Moroccan author gives both a biting critique of small-town bigotry in the 1960s and a moving tribute to the fleeting beauty of adolescence.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Settat in the 1960s, when it was still a tiny village, a young man leapt to his death in front of his stunned class and their teacher, left holding a brief, devastating suicide note. Among the students was Mohamed Leftah. Haunted by the uncommon grace of that desperate act, and the tragic image of his body lying in the courtyard, Leftah penned this chronicle of life at the time, marked by repressed desire and shame.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA fiery yet thoughtful meditation on taboo acts—homosexuality, adultery, suicide—and the hypocrisy and cruelty often found in those who judge them, \u003ci\u003eEndless Fall\u003c\/i\u003e also offers a fascinating window into the mind of the seminal writer.“Elegant…A moving, startling, enigmatic work of memory and loss that feels as fresh as when it was written.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A searching and poetic elegy for a life cut short. This slim volume packs a formidable punch.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A tribute that evokes strong, vibrant memories…short but packed with nuanced observations…emotionally wrought and captivating.” —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on what we lose as a result of religious dogma. Every sentence and every word in Leftah’s \u003ci\u003eEndless Fall\u003c\/i\u003e is so sharp and so precise. The visual world he creates through language is impossible to leave behind.” —Samra Habib, author of \u003ci\u003eWe Have Always Been Here\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A short book that carries one hell of a punch. It dives deep into worlds that are far removed from most readers, yet the way it is written—with brutality, honesty, and care—makes it a resonating, heartbreaking account of homophobia, isolation, and revisionist histories. \u003ci\u003eEndless Fall\u003c\/i\u003e kept me up with it for a fortnight, and when I was done I knew it would stay with me for a while.” —Danny Ramadan, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Foghorn Echoes\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mohamed Leftah’s \u003ci\u003eEndless Fall\u003c\/i\u003e is as powerful as it is brief. Here a memory silently carried for decades comes alive with startling vividness. Here poetry is an instrument of justice, and writing is a prayer readers are invited to join in, a ‘gesture of reconciliation’ with a past, a friend, and a city. All sensuousness and grace, this text holds together the world’s beauty and filth toward a disillusioned promise of redemption. With characteristic elegance, Eleni Sikelianos’s translation does justice to the slow, suspenseful intensity of Leftah’s finely chiseled prose.” —Omar Berrada, author of \u003ci\u003eClonal Hum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMohamed Leftah\u003c\/b\u003e was a writer and journalist born in Settat, Morocco, in 1946. He attended engineering school in Paris and then returned in 1972 to Morocco, where he became a literary critic for \u003ci\u003eLe Matin du Sahara\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLe Temps du Maroc\u003c\/i\u003e. His novels include the critically acclaimed \u003ci\u003eDemoiselles of Numidia\u003c\/i\u003e (Other Press, 2023) and \u003ci\u003eCaptain Ni’mat’s Last Battle\u003c\/i\u003e (Other Press, 2022). He died of cancer in 2008.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEleni Sikelianos \u003c\/b\u003eis a poet, writer, and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Her work has been widely fêted, translated, and anthologized, garnering numerous honors. Her books include \u003ci\u003eYour Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMake Yourself Happy\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Jon\u003c\/i\u003e. For more information, please visit her website, elenisikelianos.com.\u003cb\u003eTHE LETTER\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e*\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Dear Monsieur Ciccion,\u003cbr\u003e Please ask my mother to forgive me. \u003cbr\u003eI wish Nabil eternal happiness.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e By the time Mr. Ciccion, his face white as a sheet and his hands trembling, would begin to read and try but fail to understand the meaning of the note, so clear, so limpid even in its reticence, the young man who had just written it would already be stretched out on the courtyard’s clay ground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e . . . Stretched out . . . beneath the clouds . . .\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSweet scents don’t tickle his nose;\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eHe sleeps in the sun, a hand on his chest \u003cbr\u003eMotionless . . .\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is from memory and in memory of an unforgettable courtyard sleeper—a courtyard that, an instant before it received the celestial, splendid body’s fall, was still dusty, and from that moment on became a princely court—that I begin and dedicate this “little chronicle.”\u003cbr\u003e Which opens no holiday in my days. \u003cbr\u003ePleasure or amusement, even less.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo more than a quarter of an hour had passed between the moment when I climbed the staircase with him to reach the fourth-floor classroom where Mr. Ciccion had already started his history class—we were both late—and the moment when he became this sleeper in the bloodied courtyard; a smiling sleeper in the valley.\u003cbr\u003e Motionless . . .\u003cbr\u003e More than forty years later, I still see all the stages, the unstoppable sequences of this transmutation, unfurling so clearly before my eyes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Five.\u003cbr\u003e Five sequences. Each one thoroughly defined, each thoroughly distinct.\u003cbr\u003e Autonomous yet interdependent, as bound as the fingers on a hand.\u003cbr\u003e The contours of a drama, in a form already outlined before it bursts into the world, so clearly sketched that for a long time the idea of this little chronicle seemed to me a kind of profanation or attack.\u003cbr\u003e Against a face at once gymnast’s and ballet dancer’s, a face closed in on its own unsayable grace, its final and tragic beauty, its mortal perfection.\u003cbr\u003e A face with no need of chronicler, narrator, nor celebrant to challenge, in its pure immateriality, the perverse work of time and oblivion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eSETTAT\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e*\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e At the time these events take place, the time of the facts reported in this little chronicle, Settat was still nothing more than a tiny village dozing like a lizard under an unchanging blue, sunlit sky.\u003cbr\u003e Two annual events startled it out of its lethargy: the faithful seasonal fires that lit up the \u003ci\u003enouallas\u003c\/i\u003e, those thatch huts nestled on a hillside at the edge of town, which doggedly survived and rose from the ashes like phoenixes; then the unpredictable floods crashing out of Wadi Ben Moussa.\u003cbr\u003e A burgeoning story, still in its first stuttering, but already common knowledge and as condemned as adultery . . .\u003cbr\u003e A suicide . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePARDONING GESTURE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e*\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Would it be right to treat her as an adulterous woman, responsible for her son’s suicide?\u003cbr\u003e Khalid’s mother had been a widow such a long time. Her best years were burnt to ash by a dessicating fidelity to the memory of her dead husband.\u003cbr\u003e In his brief missive, the first person Khalid evoked was this woman harried by the hounds of judgment. In the last moments of his life he addressed his mother, begging her to forgive him.\u003cbr\u003e One of the most beautiful, moving gestures, rising from the depths of our geographical, psychic, and cultural soil, is the one in which two people, in the same movement and at the same time, give each other chaste kisses on the head and on the hands. They might be of different ages or sexes, of different social standing or character, but in this gesture all their dissimilarities and disagreements, even their hatred, if there has been any, evaporates.\u003cbr\u003e What remains is a gesture of reconciliation, a pardoning of mutual offenses, incomprehension, and wrongs that each might have done the other.\u003cbr\u003e I imagine, I am even certain of it without having witnessed it, that just a few moments beforehand, on that morning when I climbed the staircase with Khalid, this gesture flowered between him and his slandered mother, that woman hunted by gossip.\u003cbr\u003e This invisible gesture accompanied him like a traveler’s viaticum.\u003cbr\u003e For his last journey.","brand":"Other Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300161507557,"sku":"NP9781635423020","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781635423020.jpg?v=1767726273","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/endless-fall-isbn-9781635423020","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}