The first of its kind to be published in Morocco, “The Web” is the new novel by Said Addich published by Aïni Bennaï. This book, which is part of the fantastic literary genre, combines both reality and imagination.
“The Web” is the title of the new novel in English by writer and teacher Said Addich, published by Aïni Bennaï and available at the Livremoi bookstore. It is a work, the first of its kind to be published in Morocco, combining imagination and humor. “This novel is part of the fantastic literary genre, the equivalent of fantasy in English. It is a genre that is beginning to take more and more space in world literature, a literary field that understands and combines both the real and the imaginary,” explains Said Addich.
It must be said that through this book the reality of everyday life is mixed with the imagination in a quite studied way so that the reader at the end of the novel comes away with the conclusion that although the story and the scenes of the novel are not true for the moment, one day they may well be. “Who doesn’t want to experience the magical moments of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, George Macdonald’s Lilith or JKRowling’s Harry Potter. “It’s from this perspective that I wrote ‘The Web’,” he says.
Furthermore, the novel tells the story of a lawyer named Mr. Solomon who will spend a month confronting a mosquito in his room. The mosquito insists on biting him and sucking his blood every evening and the lawyer refuses to be prey to a simple mosquito. Both are determined to see this confrontation through to the end. For the mosquito, it has the natural right to suck its blood to continue living and for the lawyer, it is a question of principle: you must never give in and let yourself be done. Every evening when Mr. Solomon returns home from work, tired and just wanting to sleep, he finds the mosquito waiting.
As soon as he turns off the light, the mosquito, taking advantage of the darkness of the room, takes off like a drone and begins to fly and buzz around his ears (zzzzz…..). The sound of the mosquito becomes a siren of alarm and unbearable stress for the lawyer, a stress so hard to bear that our protagonist almost lost his mind on several occasions. During this month of confrontation between the two, several scenes, events and dialogues will take place between the two. Much of these scenes are comic with philosophical overtones. Toward the end of the month, and after hundreds of attempts, Mr. Solomon succeeded in hitting the mosquito. The latter will continue to fly with injured wings and a minute later will fall into a spider’s web in the corner of the room.
When Mr. Solomon finds the mosquito stuck in the web, he feels great relief and immediately decides to squash the mosquito but at the last second he changes his mind, revenge is a dish best served cold. This is the idea that will push him to sue the mosquito and the spider. The mosquito for blood theft and mental harassment and the spider for squatting (occupation of a house by strangers). “The trial, both legal and philosophical with several comic capsules, will bring us back to a rather unexpected ending that I invite the reader to discover. In all cases, and throughout the chapters of the novel, the main idea that seems to be constant is that if you think you are too small to change this world, you have not spent a single night with a mosquito », he concludes.
