From what little I know (very little!) Najmi is a poet of exquisite images. These dance through this story as well: red flowers on a dress, the way eyes drop and gestures fail, waves of light and beams of water. Although I am feeling unworthy to comment, I am wondering whether some of the breathy power might not survive translation; also the novel seems, at times, to struggle for breath in the tight frame of a single narrator. This unnamed narrator attempts to write the book that his old friend (who remains only as a memory himself) could not write of his memories of a encounter with Gertrude Stein (this is Najmi's fiction, although based on a few notes in Toklas' diary concerning an unnamed Moroccan) . Throughout, Picasso's portrait of Stein stands as an alternate to the portrait compiled from the friend's passionate memory. Najmi is constantly playing with the question of what an artist is doing when observing, remembering, describing, representing. Towards the end of the book, the narrator notes that most people think writing is simply "...to live life, remember it all, describe it on paper, and that's it!" Clearly, this is no more true of Najmi writing of the Moroccan shadows in Gertrude Stein's circles than it was of Picasso's portraits.

Was afraid that it would be a little too historical fiction for my taste, despite the stellar reviews. It was most certainly not. ( )