The Voices of Marrakesh

The famous travel report of unerring observer Elias Canetti is the most insightful book about the mysterious Moroccan city and oriental life – accompanied and contrasted by sympathetic photographs from this strange world.

Elias Canetti goes to Marrakesh with English friends who are making a film there. He is soon spellbound by the peculiar magic of the Middle East. He roams the town, visits the traders in the souks and the camel market, listens to the strange cries of a blind beggar, watches scribes and story-tellers who appear to him "older and better brothers", stands transfixed under a house behind whose latticed windows an unveiled madwoman recites endless monologues, and portrays Ginette who waits in a French bar for someone to take her out into the world. This is also the book which, in Francois Bondy's words, "turns [Canetti] into a trusted friend for the reader, his descriptions of the squalor and misery of an oriental metropolis at the borders of human existence radiating a kind of joy of everything human and a brotherliness towards even the most remote stranger."