Morocco then Menton, France 2018 | What I'm Reading

• The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles, 1948). Three American tourists--a husband and wife and a mostly unwelcome friend--get it all wrong as they travel through northern Morocco. They like to think of themselves as down-to-earth authentic travelers but fail to fit in or connect in any way to the very un-American locals. Track down the 1990 movie with John Malcovich and Debra Winger, then call me for a date!
• The Spider's House (Paul Bowles, 1984). My personal favorite, this story is set in Fez in 1954 just two years before Morocco achieved independence from France. Fez is broken up and breaking down with the Nationalists seeking to remove France from the country while retaining all that's good about their occupation, and the traditional Muslim tribally-connected families disenchanted by both.  The French are mostly dismissed as violent occupiers defending their colonial territory, but the contrasts between the motives of the Nationalists and traditionalists offer good insight on this bit of history, and the cultural clashes between the Americans and Moroccans sometimes read like a warning to all who would travel here. 
• The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca (Tahir Shah, 2006). By the author of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, you have to envy this author/traveler for his genius as a memoir writer. This time his effort to make a home for himself and young family in a shanty town outside of Casablanca is plagued by the bad fortune brought on by jinns (who resent his presence in the house) and his western ideals about how things get done. With the help of the bicultural-bilingual Kamal, he makes dubious progress. It's 343 pages, and 365 days, filled to bursting with cultural knowledge, funny and frustrating, and a forewarning to all who would travel there to beware of assumptions. This is Morocco. Let's hope it makes film.
• The Forgiven (Lawrence Osborne, 2012). A short read, an intense thriller, told without sparing the reader much at all, this story takes you to an expat mansion in the hills and a party fit for a bunch of well-healed westerners. You spend most of your time with one couple from Britain, who, on the way to the party, run down a young Moroccan (supposedly) selling fossils on the side of the road. I couldn't put this down, and went back to the last few pages repeatedly to make sure I hadn't missed anything! After Margaret pointed out that this is where we will be traveling, I spent a whole night tracing the route described in the book, and with some trepidation, matching it up to our itinerary into the middle and high Atlas.
• Hitler's Spy: A Novel of Deception (Colin Minor, 2012). This historical fiction is by one of my former EPL library trustee colleagues, and I dug it out and read it again. Set in a suburb of Casablanca during WWII, it embeds the story of the meeting of allied leaders to plan war strategy. I think I learned more about Churchill from this book than from any TV series. It's filled with intrigue, drawing a close line between fact and fiction.