Some of The Hospital’s strangest and most moving passages are those in which the narrator, in what seems to be a fever dream, slips back into the skin of the child he was ... Sometimes these conjurings are achieved with remarkable ease ... At other times, Bouanani suggests that communing with the past and the dead comes at a steep price ... One of the remarkable characteristics of The Hospital is how masterfully it weaves together high and low registers, wistfulness and violence, the lyrical and the scatological. Bouanani’s writing—which in The Hospital, and especially in the original French, uncoils in long, barbed sentences—mixes melancholy, fury, wild visions, and humor. Some of this is lost in Vergnaud’s translation, which although generally faithful and graceful breaks the long French sentences into shorter declarative ones in English, sometimes changing the order and therefore the emphasis of their parts. Bouanani’s language still has its force but it loses some of its rhythm and lands fewer of its blows.
The patient—suffering from an unnamed illness—becomes trapped in a bewildering twilight between life and death. The hospital is a haunted shadow world where memory struggles for a breath of air, where the grotesque facts of the outside country are gone over at leisure. Indignities and past sufferings (long-ago familial deaths, a childhood friend left asleep under a streetlamp, the violent and petty offenses of self-proclaimed criminals) are felt again, perhaps made worse by the removal: the ability to sit and think over events with no further possibility of investigation, action, or intervention ... There is no real story—which might sound like a critique but in fact is a kind of writing that can be just as cogent and enjoyable as the other, more plot-based or emotionally arcing sort, when the bursts of dialogue, bits of mordant wisdom, and small occurrences are done as well as they are done here.
Bouanani’s work has a timeless urgency to it, the kind of timeless frustration that can only come from a specific time and place. And like The Trial or the great Eastern Bloc science-fiction of the 1960s and 70s or other great dystopian novels of the past, the human rage, frustration, and isolation it expresses is equally poignant in past, present, and future.
...as Bouanani parses out his disturbing material, the brief chapters feel as much bumptious as grim, and even sometimes laughable ... The oxymoron makes a terrific fit for a narrative that has fun—in its own rumpled blue way—with Hell ... Such stuff recalls Beckett ... By and large I found The Hospital a singular experience, one of those that locates a new hook on which to hang a story. The text’s joy and melancholy works up an unlikely narrative momentum—suspense ... For The Hospital they found the award-winning translator Lara Vergnaud; between her thoughtful afterword and the introduction by Anna Della Subin, a biography and more, the text in hand glows a like a double-miracle, in its provenance as well as in how it sets its skeletons dancing ... with The Hospital he made it, demonstrating, again, how the best work can run any gantlet, even one lined with devils.
It would be hard to avoid the word 'Kafkaesque' in describing this dreamlike and symbolic excursion into an institution that represents suffering humanity ... Bouanani plunges the reader into a world of pain, misery, and mystery—a world in which no one leaves the hospital because no one is ever cured .. From the opening sentence—'When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive'—Bouanani introduces a world of confinement and a kind of death in life ... Incongruously, amid the bleakness of the patients’ lives, the hospital has a garden, ancient oaks, and profuse vegetation. Bouanani foregoes conventional narrative structure and instead presents his plot as a series of encounters—some brutish, some tender—between patients. The narrator uses the dreamlike aura of the hospital in a self-conscious way as he wonders for 'the thousandth time' what he’s doing there and questions whether his experience is 'dream or reality'—and he then aptly alludes to his earlier reading of Kafka and Borges ... A puzzling but haunting novel.
Moroccan filmmaker and writer Bouanani’s...mind-bending 1990 work about secluded, chronically ill patients blurs lines between history, Islamic folklore, and nightmares. The unnamed narrator is admitted to a labyrinthine hospital for treatment of an unspecified disease. To survive the tedium of endless days and unexplained but gentle treatments, the narrator chronicles his slightly detached interactions with fellow patients ... The narrator increasingly loses his sense of reality, seeing himself in the afterlife and his own past and overhearing possibly imagined conversations ... The layers of metaphor and surreal imagery create a atmospheric, unresolved tension for fans of compressed, unsettling narratives.
