Like a cosmic odyssey, Lahcen Benaziza transports the reader on a 328-page journey exploring the mystery of a mythical character. The splendid life of a great traveler is the title of the journey of Ayoub Benaissa, a former professor of English literature, who lives in a typical small Moroccan town as a destitute recluse, voiceless and suffering from a very marked limp. since the tragic accident he had a few years ago.
Published by Afrique Orient, this novel in English The Splendid Life of a Frequent Traveler signed by Lahcen Benaziza, retired professor of English Literature at Ibn Zohr University. The 328-page novel is called The Splendid Life of a Frequent Traveler. The story revolves around the life of a former professor of English literature. A similarity which suggests autobiographic clues. Is the author hiding behind his character to reveal fragments of his own life? Careful reading is necessary to lift the veil on this enigma.
The protagonist, lame since a mysterious accident revealed late, is driven by a compulsion to “ to travel ” each Saturday. His limited financial means and his infirmity plunge him into a series of humiliations during his tumultuous journey to the airport. However, in the midst of the trials, he escapes into the past, reviving with vivid memory the significant stages of his life. Despite his physical limitations, Ayoub retains the sharp mind of an intellectual, formulating penetrating reflections on his reality, that of others and that of his country.
Crossed by a breath of love, the novel plunges the reader into a relationship that haunts Ayoub’s mind. Opening in medias res, the first chapter evokes Sheryl, a deceased lover who still inhabits his thoughts. Ayoub recalls their shared years in Halifax, Nova Scotia, marked by exquisite moments and identity conflicts.
A disturbing incident leads him to remember his family’s history and the troubles his grandparents had with the French colonizer and his Moroccan acolytes. One thing led to another, Ayoub found himself focused on a significant event in his childhood: the exodus of his parents from the countryside to the city. The narrator gives this grueling journey on a rickety cart, pulled by an aging horse in the middle of the rainy season, an epic dimension. The child’s gradual realization that his family was going to live, not in the posh houses they pass through, but in a slum, is a Source of pain but also of poignant humor.
Through the vagaries of memory, the narrator retraces Ayoub’s education with its humiliations and its rewards, as well as the perplexity implied by a painfully late realization of his severe myopia and its disastrous consequences. Then his wandering memory flashes back to the year he spent in the United States under the auspices of an exchange program. Remembering that year with all its contradictions, he is led to think of the periodic visits he made as a child to his aunt Khadija in Inezgan and of the deep friendship that united this Muslim woman with Zohra, her Jewish neighbor. . The story of this moving friendship is edifying.
The car accident that the narrator refers to from time to time is finally revealed towards the end of the novel. On the way home, after an exceptionally idyllic and conflict-free hike through a scenic natural spot called Paradise Valley, Sheryl, insisting on driving, loses control of the car and ends up crashing into a steep ravine. Sheryl dies and Ayoub ends up in a clinic, with a mutilated foot and mental trauma from which he will never recover.
The irony of the title strikes the reader when he realizes that Ayoub is far from being a frequent traveler: when he arrives at the airport every Saturday, he sits in the departure area, and in the middle from the ebb and flow of passengers, he gives free rein…to the flights of his memory.
His memories, persistent despite time, come to life in a thick notepad that he furiously takes out of his scruffy backpack. What appear to be insignificant scribbles turn out to be a narrative tour de force after his death.
Malnourished and suffering from bronchitis, Ayoub is found dead one morning, his fingers clenched on the blood-stained notepad. This notebook finally reveals its true nature: a narrative masterpiece, the last vestige of the tormented but richly lived life of Ayoub Benaissa.
