Cave of Tablets

Mohammed Saeed Ahjiuj

It's as if someone is deliberately erasing the evidence that disappears as we progress through the novel by Moroccan writer Mohamed Said Ahjiouj. Who is writing whom? Who resides in whose memory? Who is jumping from balconies? Who is hiding the bodies that fall?
The reader may feel he needs a guide to read this novel. With his meticulous narrative technique, Ahjijouj traces the paths and labyrinths of memory, and its possibilities, devoid of any logical temporal context. No one will provide us with evidence that what happened really happened. There is a group of stories whose connections we will only discover later, even though the end may be just another beginning.
The novel is a series of narrative movements, more like scenes that replay in the mind, but with slight differences each time, manifested either by a change in the features of one of the characters, or by a change in their name, or in details of their family history. The events that take place are the only constant. Through their repetition, reading and writing become a single act. Writing seems more like a compulsive response to a text dictated to the writer, to a text that has already been completed. Perhaps the writer is just another character in someone else's story, where the tablets inside the cave contain all destinies, and where life is also a single book with pages in which we can do nothing but fill in the blanks with our names.