... more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self ... Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect ... great emotional effect ... Taïa masterfully conveys...characters’ frustrations by equating their work to a performance of sorts—a(n) (dis)illusion ... These crushing depictions serve an important political purpose in Taïa’s deft hands: they showcase how sexuality, too, can be colonized ... A Country for Dying during a period of widespread immigration, social distancing, and oppression of marginalized groups feels almost prescient. Its powerful lyricism, on the other hand—fully captured in Ramadan’s skillful translation—is positively timeless.

... out of a polyphonic onslaught, Taïa fashions a globe-trotting yet tenuous story. The author, who grew up in Morocco and lives in France, excels when contrasting the dreams of two of his three main characters, all of whom are North African prostitutes, with the grimness of demimonde Paris ... translated into appropriately gritty English by Ramadan ... Taïa’s third main character is Zineb ... Zineb’s tale...jars with the stories of Zahira and Aziz, owing to its brevity and altogether different time and place. Nevertheless, Taïa adroitly conveys the sobering message that, whether in the mid-20th century or in the early 21st, sexual stigma is often irremovable, and can even foreclose the possibility of a return home.

Impressionistic and digressive, A Country for Dying has no plot nor consistent perspective. The narrative moves through time and space in a manner that can be disorienting, one character’s story blending into the next—their fantasies, fixations, and traumas merging. There are points where these transitions feel jarring or overly tenuous, and in that way, this book is challenging. But the patient reader will be well rewarded—the book has no omniscient narrator to act as a guide, but neither does it contain any contrivance or false emotion. Its prose is forceful and direct—this, no doubt, is thanks to Emma Ramadan’s fluid, responsive, and economical translation—and it becomes clear, by the book’s conclusion, that the author’s vision is cohesive and elegant ... it feels true and correct that his narrative is fragmented and littered with jagged edges, and that his characters are at once violent and rageful, remorseful and dreamy.

... heart-wrenching ... Taïa’s blunt style is shot through with an immediacy accenting the high stakes for those chased across borders and running from their own pasts ... In the churning gears of this compact, deeply moving novel, crises of identity prove more solvable than those of the heart.

Taïa is disarmingly unafraid to revel in the sensuality of trauma, even if, or specially when, it involves the impossibility of consent and children’s early experiences of the body ... The novel is a fresco of departures, imagined and actual, intertwining tales of the wretched of the Earth leaving their country in order to die in another ... Some of the most beautiful moments here emerge when dialogue turns into all but a string of poetic lines, and it becomes pleasantly unclear who the speaker and addressee are. These instances embody the to-and-fro of Taïa’s style, where an adult is always one feeling away from becoming a child again. We may not know who’s speaking but we know something ancestral is being written, or rewritten ... Zahira’s words flow seamlessly from first-person narration to her thoughts being directed to the dead father in short and disarmingly simple sentences. So simple that in the few instances when Taïa writes more abstract terms like 'unconscious,' 'commodity', or 'anathema,' they feel like a jump cut in the text. We are inevitably conducted back to the intimacy of poetry rearranged into prose ... The poetic register of A Country for Dying is wrought by an eventfulness triggered by the tiniest things that just keep on echoing generations later: a memory, a song, a stranger.

None of these characters emerges as a fully formed person, and they all speak with the same fervent, poetic voice. But in these vignettes and monologues, Taïa offers American readers glimpses of lives few of us are likely to see outside of this book. Lyrical and impassioned.