From Sign to Image

Primarily a novelist, Abdelkebir Khatibi of Morocco is one of the most philosophically engaging and stylistically innovative Maghrebian writers of the French language. Drawing upon his native Arab-Berber oral traditional and cultural heritage, his writings trace the journey of a man constantly in search of a new identity. This search is reflected in such works as La Memoire Tatouee (1971), Le Livre du Sang (1983), and Un Ete a Stockholm (1990). In his work, Khatibi has created a fictional world in which elements such as character and setting anticipate and complement each other. Together with a skillful use of inchoate patterns and themes, Khatibi's style is characterized by a subtle use of language with which he conveys a sense of otherness or difference in a world where individual identity is constantly threatened by sameness.

Khatibi's major fictional writings include La Memoire Tatouee (1971), Amour Bilingue (1983), Le Livre du Sang (1983), Maghreb au Pluriel (1983), Figures de l'Etranger (1987), Par-dessus l'Epaule (1988), and Un Ete a Stockholm (1990). Of these, only one work (Amour Bilingue) has been translated into English as Love in Two Languages.

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