I have a dried cuttlefish habit. That is, I can open a bag and consume it within minutes. Love my tentacles.What does that admission have to do with this book? I ate this book up the way I eat my squid. The words were inhaled and then it was over. Over! Too soon.This is a slim volume but the stories have depth. On a zodiac boat speeding its way across the Strait of Gibraltar, we meet hopeful Moroccans who hope to land on the shores of Spain where they believe their fortune will be made. Their gr...

Reread in August 2020. This was one of the books from my postcolonial class that left a less-bad taste in my mouth (as compared to the other books in the class). It was actually comprehensible and not in a foreign language, so there's that going for it.In all seriousness, I'm glad I returned to this. The writing is well done, with some good physical details that really keep the reader engaged, there with the character in those surroundings. This book is more a snapshot, a taste of these people's...

Lalami takes us aboard a crammed inflatable boat as several immigrants from Tangiers try to cross the Gibraltar straight into Spain. But the person they paid to take them to shore, stops short of the shore and drops them off, when some of the passengers cannot swim. Some drown. The novel is the interwoven stories of four of the survivors, some who made it to Spain and some who did not. It reads very much like a fable and reminds me of the Alchemist. Each character undergoes a transformation, inc...

I'd love to give this one five stars as I think it is truly unique and well written. But it just doesn't give quite enough sense of resolution for me to be totally satisfied. A great book detailing the plight of several Moroccans and following their attempt to migrate to escape the lack of jobs and hopelessness of Morocco. Each chapter is the perspective of one of the characters - - either before or after they've tried to emigrate. The prose is spare and easy to read. A little treasure of a book...

The more I read from Northern Africa and in to some extent the Middle East the more complex the narrative is. This along with books like The Drum Tower or The Cry of the Dove give me a glimpse at how varied the stories are. How varied the choices the characters make are; how varied the reasons for those choices are. I've barely scratched the surface in these regions and I just want to read more.

It tells the story of four characters:Murad, Aziz, Halima, and Faten who decided to risk their lives to go to Spain on a boat. Murad is an educated man from Tangier who got his BA degree in English studies but failed to find a work.Aziz is also tired of being unemployed, so he leaves Casablanca to find a decent job in Spain.Halima is fleeing, with her children, her alcoholic husband who beats her everytime she talks about money.Faten is a religious fanatic student from rabat who has been stopped...

Not going to be a long review...Reads as a series of connected short stories, featuring the lives of a few Morrocans before leaving, as well as some epilogue (followup). Good cross-section between single individuals and those with families. Author does a solid job getting across lack-of-opportunity as a motive. Minus, I suppose, would be that I felt the need to suspend disbelief on occasion.Definitely recommended

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila LalamiPosted on January 29, 2012 by Suzanne “FOURTEEN KILOMETERS. Murad has pondered that number hundreds of times in the last year, trying to decide whether the risk was worth it. Some days he told himself that the distance was nothing, a brief inconvenience, that the crossing would take as little as thirty minutes if the weather was good.”For many Muslims living in Morocco, the idea of escape to the West is the promise of a better life: a job, the abi...

11 kilometres, the distance between Morocco and Spain. The distance between poverty and possibility for many. A journey thousands risk their life on a regular basis. Hope and other dangerous pursuits is the story of four individuals trying to unshackle themselves from their lives in Morocco and travel to Spain.All four of them narrate their story and we go back and forth. We learn of their past, their present and the future they dream of. They journey together on the tiny boat in the middle of n...

This book opened my eyes to immigration in Europe. It seemed very similar to Mexican and especially Cuban immigration to the US. For some strange reason, it is comforting to know that other countries face some of the same issues and challenges as the US. I liked the the author's technique of introducing us to the characters in the midst of the trip, and then backtracking to tell us their history, and how they got to that point. This book read super fast, but I was left wanting to know more about...

I was hooked with the first chapter. A group of people set off in a small boat to cross the strait of Gibraltar away from Morocco towards Europe and towards hope. Some made it some did not. What happened to get them to this point where they are willing to risk it all and what happened afterwards? Was it worth it? Wonderful short novel that truly explores the idea of hope and the impetus to change your circumstance.

This is the book that Rochester, NY reads for 2008. The subject is informative as it regards the lives of men and women struggling to survive in modern Morocco. The format of short stories describing one critical moment in the lives of four characters, then the past, and later the present is unique. The writing is stark and simple in a good way. I liked the book - I do not love it.

This is a novel that is pure storytelling - no real authorial artistic flair is added. Also, while the characters are real enough, their psychologies are not really presented with much development. Still, I recommend this short novel because its content is fascinating.Lalami clearly wants to give her English speaking audience (I am sure this book would be quite different if it were written for a Moroccan or Maghrebian readership) some insight into what brings a person to risk the treacherous jou...

Although this book was written 10 years ago, it remains timely in that it illustrates the problems that are still being faced by people trying to cross the Mediterranean in sub-standard boats in order to leave their home countries in Africa and get to what they hope is a better life in Europe. The immigrants in this particular book are fleeing Morocco for Spain. Cleverly structured, the book takes us on that journey in part 1 and we meet some of the people making that dangerous crossing. Part 2

For a debut, this book was pretty good. I would probably pick up something by Lalami again. The writing seemed a little stiff, but not so bad as to get in the way, and in some places it was good.I liked the way the story was told: It begins with a clandestine trip from Morocco to Spain, and we get to know a bit about each of the characters on the boat. From there it goes to the back story of each of the characters on the boat, one by one, each very different, and each having a different reason f...

The first thing that drew me to this book was the title — Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. It left a lot to my imagination and fired up my thinking process. Who are the hopeful? Why is it a dangerous pursuit? What other dangerous pursuits are therein? This book is such a unique one. It deals with immigration, fanaticism, hypocrisy, abuse, queerness and many more themes. So many questions were asked in this book and some were answered while some were left to the reader’s thoughts and ability to...

This is the first novel I read from Moroccan author Laila Lalami, living in USA and writing in English, and this book was also her first novel. This novel stands out from other novels written by other Moroccan writers from both a different writing style and the originality of the topic. Behind the sad statistics of casualties among the "boat people", whether those trying to reach to Miami from Cuba, or to Spain from Morocco, and/or to Italy from Syria/turkey, there are real people with real face...

He’d been so consumed with his imagined future that he hadn’t noticed how it had started to overtake something inside him, bit by bit. He’d been living in the future, thinking of all his tomorrows in a better place, never realizing that his past was drifting. […] He wondered if one always had to sacrifice the past for the future, or if it was something he had done, something peculiar to him, an inability to fill himself with too much, so that for every new bit of imagined future, he had to forsa...

I loved the way in which this story was told. The recurring event--immigration to Spain from Morocco-- is represented by one group of immigrants. Four of them then frame the event with the before and after, which inevitably shake preconceptions and judgments made at the outset by the narrator (and, ostensibly, the reader). The story tells a lot about the complexity of modern Moroccan society and also raises many of the difficult questions in the immigration debate. Highly recommended.