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“Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table,” a first Libyan novel in the form of a tragicomic confession.
There is Milad’s bread but also Milad’s sugar. Did Mohammed Alnaas’ hero miss the train of virility by taking care of his sisters’ legs? The only boy in the family made a specialty from adolescence: preparing caramel with rose water or orange blossom which will be used for the hair removal of Saliha, Safa, Sabah and Asma. And then he knows how to pull the strips of warm and supple caramel with delicacy, the slight suffering is delicious, say those interested. Later it is Zeinab, the fiancée, with whom he indulges in other games in the apartment of an artistic and liberal uncle, who takes advantage of his talents as a hair eradicator. Milad is definitely on the margins of the role expected of him. When he catches him participating in these boudoir scenes, the father is furious and slaps him. And here is the boy taken from this sweet sororal nest: from now on he will go every day to the kousha, the great paternal bakery “inherited” from an Italian master, les Epis d’or. There another form of sensuality awaits him, he learns with love the profession, the making of all kinds of bread, Italian, Tunisian, English, French.
Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table unfolds six parts like so many places visited by memory: “the bakery”, “the barracks”, “the family house”… More original, each one highlights, as in a Stations of the Cross, a popular proverb. Put end to end they are a desperate sexist litany conveying
