Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published in France in 1977,
The Desert tells the story of al-Mammi, a young exiled prince of a now-destroyed Jewish kingdom in southern Morocco in the late fourteenth century. Fighting battles in the service of kings and narrowly escaping imprisonment, the prince travels the Islamic world absorbing lessons, often painfully, on how to govern himself, as well as a country. At that same time, al-Mammi engages upon a spiritual journey to obtain inner wisdom rather than material riches. Memmi chronicles the prince’s fortunes as they rise and fall, drawing upon the traditions of Maghrebian storytelling and Arabian tales to offer a highly imaginative and allegorical novel that provocatively blends history with fiction.
About the author
Albert Memmi is the author of numerous philosophical/sociological essays and is particularly known for his groundbreaking study of the predicament of the colonized in The Colonizer and the Colonized and for his novels, Pillar of Salt (1953), Strangers (1955), and The Scorpion (1969), all set in Tunisia. The Desert, first published in French in 1977, is his fourth novel. In 2004, the Académie Française awarded him the Grand Prix de la Francophonie for his work as a whole.Judith Roumani is the translator of Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970 by Renzo De Felice (1985) and author of Albert Memmi (1987), as well as other studies of Memmi, and numerous publications in comparative literature and Sephardic studies.
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