The Bottom Of The Jar - Tapa blanda

"'Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis' also returns us to the shared historical beginnings of poetry and religious text, the shared tools of verse and image... Though religious texts have also been famously open to widely differing interpretations, those interpretations have tended to view themselves as corrective and final. No such finality will be possible here. The richness of imagery and slewing of the narrative in more than one direction work against any such tactic."
--Alistair Noon, Blackbox Manifold

Fire. Germination. Birth. Blood. All these themes are burnished and boned image by image until they echo through Abdellatif's book.... Abdellatif Laabi, 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 Laabi
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 Clezio, 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)
Laabi's poetic voice consistently raises a song of possibilities above the dirge of cruelty. Victor Reinking"