La Blanche

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Casablanca, 1992. Caiff gŵr ei wthio i'w farwolaeth ar risiau marmor plasty Art Deco. Ni chafwyd eglurhad am ei lofruddiaeth fyth, a rhwygwyd teulu, ffordd o fyw a meddyliau ei wraig a'i ferch gan y drychineb. Mae'r naratif hardd gan Mai-Do Hamisultane - a ysgrifennwyd yn y person cyntaf - yn symud yn ôl ac ymlaen rhwng amser a lle gan blethu gwe gain o ffaith a ffuglen.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Casablanca, 1992. In a white Art Deco villa, a man is pushed down the marble staircase to his death. His murder, never truly explained, fractures a family, a way of life, and the minds of both his wife and his daughter. In a beautifully constructed first-person narrative that shifts in time and place, Mai-Do Hamisultane weaves a delicate web of fact and fiction.

Dosbarthu

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Maï-Do Hamisultane is a Franco-Moroccan writer born in La Rochelle in 1983. After a childhood spent between Cap d’Antibes and Casablanca, she studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris, before going on to study medicine and specialise in psychiatry. As the literary critic Meriem El Youssoufi points out, the literary works of Maï-Do Hamisultane navigate between the real and the imaginary. La Blanche was nominated for the prestigious Prix La Mamounia in 2014. Hamisultane's other work includes Santo Sospir (2015), and Lettres à Abel (2017).

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Parthian Carnivale series title Creative Europe award title Winner of the La Mamounia Literary Award Author won the Discovery Award of the Literary Prize of Sofitel Casablanca Tour Blanche for her follow-up

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

In 1992, MaÏ-Do Hamisultane’s family was shattered by the murder of her grandfather. The event robbed the nine-year-old Hamisultane of her childhood and uprooted her from her comfortable, secure life in Mira Ventos – a beautiful white villa in Casablanca – as she fled to France with her mother and grandmother. La Blanche begins twenty years later. Returning to Casablanca for the first time since the murder, the narrator revisits the now-neglected Mira Ventos. Recently abandoned by a lover, and traumatised again, she is engaged in a search for clues to the past that might help her heal. Not a biographical account in the conventional sense, this complex tale can be more accurately described as a fictionalised memoir. With a first-person narrative that leaps in and out of different time frames, it blurs past and present, fact and fiction, so creating a sense of anxiety and entrapment, ‘as though life is determined to reduce people to their past, denying them the freedom to start again’. La Blanche , the debut work of the young Franco-Moroccan author, was first published in French in 2013 to much critical acclaim. In her introduction, the book’s translator, Suzy Ceulan Hughes, points to a text that is brimming with intertextual referencing of the work of other (French and Moroccan) writers – most notably the experimental filmmaker and novelist Marguerite Duras, although perhaps it is the author’s Proustian longing for lost memories that would be more familiar to Anglophone readers. From ‘the rose bushes breathing out their scent’ to the ‘platefuls of beghir, Moroccan pancakes, drizzled with honey’, fragments of the past are recalled and reclaimed. La Blanche is a rich, multi-layered, and sometimes disturbing tale. Part mosaic of shattered memories and emotions, part murder mystery, part play on truth and fiction, it can be read – and re-read – on any, or all, of these levels.