Endless Fall: A Little Chronicle

Endless Fall: A Little Chronicle

In this poignant account of a classmate’s suicide, the acclaimed Moroccan author gives both a biting critique of small-town bigotry in the 1960s and a moving tribute to the fleeting beauty of adolescence. In Settat in the 1960s, when it was still a tiny village, a young man leapt to his death in front of his stunned class and their teacher, left holding a brief, devastating suicide note. Among the students was Mohamed Leftah. Haunted by the uncommon grace of that desperate act, and the tragic image of his body lying in the courtyard, Leftah penned this chronicle of life at the time, marked by repressed desire and shame. A fiery yet thoughtful meditation on taboo acts—homosexuality, adultery, suicide—and the hypocrisy and cruelty often found in those who judge them, Endless Fall also offers a fascinating window into the mind of the seminal writer. “Elegant…A moving, startling, enigmatic work of memory and loss that feels as fresh as when it was written.” — Kirkus Reviews   “A searching and poetic elegy for a life cut short. This slim volume packs a formidable punch.” — Publishers Weekly “A tribute that evokes strong, vibrant memories…short but packed with nuanced observations…emotionally wrought and captivating.” — Library Journal “A beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on what we lose as a result of religious dogma. Every sentence and every word in Leftah’s Endless Fall is so sharp and so precise. The visual world he creates through language is impossible to leave behind.” —Samra Habib, author of We Have Always Been Here “A short book that carries one hell of a punch. It dives deep into worlds that are far removed from most readers, yet the way it is written—with brutality, honesty, and care—makes it a resonating, heartbreaking account of homophobia, isolation, and revisionist histories. Endless Fall kept me up with it for a fortnight, and when I was done I knew it would stay with me for a while.” —Danny Ramadan, author of The Foghorn Echoes “Mohamed Leftah’s Endless Fall is as powerful as it is brief. Here a memory silently carried for decades comes alive with startling vividness. Here poetry is an instrument of justice, and writing is a prayer readers are invited to join in, a ‘gesture of reconciliation’ with a past, a friend, and a city. All sensuousness and grace, this text holds together the world’s beauty and filth toward a disillusioned promise of redemption. With characteristic elegance, Eleni Sikelianos’s translation does justice to the slow, suspenseful intensity of Leftah’s finely chiseled prose.” —Omar Berrada, author of Clonal Hum Mohamed Leftah was a writer and journalist born in Settat, Morocco, in 1946. He attended engineering school in Paris and then returned in 1972 to Morocco, where he became a literary critic for Le Matin du Sahara and Le Temps du Maroc . His novels include the critically acclaimed Demoiselles of Numidia (Other Press, 2023) and Captain Ni’mat’s Last Battle (Other Press, 2022). He died of cancer in 2008. Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Her work has been widely fêted, translated, and anthologized, garnering numerous honors. Her books include Your Kingdom , Make Yourself Happy , and The Book of Jon . For more information, please visit her website, elenisikelianos.com. THE LETTER * “Dear Monsieur Ciccion, Please ask my mother to forgive me. I wish Nabil eternal happiness.” By the time Mr. Ciccion, his face white as a sheet and his hands trembling, would begin to read and try but fail to understand the meaning of the note, so clear, so limpid even in its reticence, the young man who had just written it would already be stretched out on the courtyard’s clay ground. . . . Stretched out . . . beneath the clouds . . . Sweet scents don’t tickle his nose; He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his chest Motionless . . . It is from memory and in memory of an unforgettable courtyard sleeper—a courtyard that, an instant before it received the celestial, splendid body’s fall, was still dusty, and from that moment on became a princely court—that I begin and dedicate this “little chronicle.” Which opens no holiday in my days. Pleasure or amusement, even less. No more than a quarter of an hour had passed between the moment when I climbed the staircase with him to reach the fourth-floor classroom where Mr. Ciccion had already started his history class—we were both late—and the moment when he became this sleeper in the bloodied courtyard; a smiling sleeper in the valley. Motionless . . . More than forty years later, I still see all the stages, the unstoppable sequences of this transmutation, unfurling so clearly before my eyes. Five. Five sequences. Each one thoroughly defined, each thoroughly distinct. Autonomous yet interdependent, as bound as the fingers on a hand. The contours of a drama, in a form already outlined before it bursts into the world, so clearly s