“When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears."
Introduction to the Moroccan writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani's cult classic novel, THE HOSPITAL. Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud. Published by New Directions, 2018.
THE NIGHT JOURNEY OF AHMED BOUANANI, an excerpt from the introduction in Bidoun.
An excerpt from THE HOSPITAL in TANK.
"Rescued: Ahmed Bouanani" in the New Yorker.
