Najat El Hachmi: L’últim patriarca (The Last Patriarch)

The latest addition to my website is Najat El Hachmi‘s L’últim patriarca (The Last Patriarch). Najat El Hachmi may not seem a Catalan name and it is not. El Hachmi was born in Morocco but her family moved to Catalonia when she was eight and Catalan was the language she learned to read and write in. Her first book was called I, Too, Am Catalan. This novel tells the story of Mimoun, the eponymous last patriarch, who is a violent, drunken, unfaithful, cruel, bullying and controlling man. It is narrated by his daughter. The first part is before her birth, from his birth to her birth, and tells of how he became as obnoxious as he did and how he married the narrator’s mother. The second part, set in Barcelona, tells of his continued bad behaviour but also shows how the narrator coped both with him (and her mother) and with living in a country which, in many respects, was foreign. It won the prestigious Ramon Llull Prize in 2008.

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