Qu'elle aille au diable Meryl Streep !

by Rachid El-Daif

Le film Kramer contre Kramer renvoie le narrateur à son propre mariage, qui part en capilotade, et devient prétexte à aborder les problèmes du couple et de la sexualité d'une façon explicite et directe non exempte d'humour.

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Moushine Zahr]

This is the first novel I've read from Libanese author Rachid El-Daif. This is also the first Arab book that is explicit about sexual relationships. The story is about a newlywed husband, who's realizing that his wife might be more experienced sexually than what he wished and thought before marrying her. The novel is written almost entirely in the format of a very long monologue about the husband thinking about the sexuality of his wife. Some readers can be offended by how explicit and graphic the story is. Other readers might believe that through the story depiciting the sexual relationship of this couple, the author is confirming the conservative right for husband to be married to a virgin wife, while others might think that the author wrote such a caricatural figure of a man obsessed with the sexuality of his wife and his own, that the author is criticizing men like him. It is difficult through reading this book, what the author's real intentions were.

However, for me, the biggest flaw of the book is that it is only half complete. The author wrote the entire story from the perspecitive of the husband. He should have written a second part of the novel to write again the entire same story, but from the perspective of the wife. It would have been more fair, more complete and better to have opinions from both sides. I guess that the original idea of writing openly about sexual relationship within a couple is good, but there are flaws in the execution.