The Bottom of the Jar

Fire. Germination. Birth. Blood. All these themes are burnished and boned image by image until they echo through Abdellatif’s book…. Abdellatif Laâbi, as you will see, is a member of the same cell as Dostoevsky, Hikmet, Soyinka, Cervantes… —Breyten Breytenbach, for Rue du Retour

By the winner of the Goncourt Prize for Poetry The Bottom of the Jar is surely the novel I wrote with the greatest joy. —Abdellatif Laâbi

At once classic (in tone) and modern (in form), The Bottom of the Jar is imbued with humor and a sensibility that gives it a certain magic. The result: two hundred fifty pages of pure pleasure. —La Vie Economique

A master of his art. —Le Nouvel Observateur

A valuable book: inventive and philosophically amusing, it assures us that despite dark times, human virtue still shines in Maghreb with a clarity that is unquestionably brightest in the old city of Fez. —J.M.G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize

The Bottom of the Jar is an authentic and beautiful bildungsroman in which life and political struggle take place in one space, with the demand for Moroccan independence joining the need for personal emancipation in a sublime way. —Quotidien National

Created with gentleness and with fury, with words that thrill the soul, that cry out with the urge to live, with hope and with suffering —Jeune Afrique

The great power and subtlety of the work lies in the fine balance it strikes between that Peter Pan–like sensitivity, vulnerability and imagination, and the brutality of the real world, history and politics. —The Daily Star (Lebanon)

Laâbi’s poetic voice consistently raises a song of possibilities above the dirge of cruelty. —Victor Reinking