Henna

"I get up, smoke a cigarette, and look out the window. I see a woman sitting on a balcony, coating her loose hair with henna. I's an erotic image. I think of her, not as she is now but after her bath; I can almost smell the scent of henna, the scent of her skin."

Tahar Ben Jelloun's Corruption, my new read. The broken man - L'homme rompu translated into "corruption": how it soaks the mind, silently, pervasively. A writer of people and their daily difficulties, I caught a rare moment of quietness in Jelloun's social argument. Will come back for more. A good summary here, in French.

The author on "Corruption": "Dans L'homme rompu, un roman qui raconte comment un honnête homme est poussé à la corruption par sa femme, je parlais déjà de l'usure de la vie conju­gale. Dans la société marocaine, le mal­entendu entre l'homme et la femme est permanent. [...] Le statut de la femme donne, à tort, l'apparence d'une société patriarcale." And a very tentative translation: In "Corruption", a novel that tells how an honest man is pushed to corruption by his wife, I mention already the friction in married life. In Moroccan society the misunderstanding betweem man and wife is permanent. The role of the wife makes it seem a patriarch society. Marriage. What a wonderful institution.