The Avicenne bookstore flicks its silken tongue to the pavement. Five years of Arabic in her veins, and Leyla can barely manage to string together a sentence without stumbling over every word. No one will notice anyway; she can feign bilingualism as long as she can babble dialect to the enthusiastic white masses. But here she can't pretend—which explains why she's had stomach pains since her arrival and feels like emptying her guts. She picks out a book at random: الملك الضلّيل. Even deciphering it is difficult: she won't get any further. She goes to the children's section: somewhat easier, but look at the absurdity of it all… All these great minds have translated into their master's language what comes from the language of men—an exchange among equals—while they stand with their arms hanging limply at their sides. Abu Sir and Abu Kir She can barely understand it. "Can I help you?" asks a stern man behind tinted glasses. She doesn't want to disturb him.
Content
Sample excerpt
This scene falls within the fifth chapter, the early part of Leyla's days-long wanderings through Paris, shortly after she has taken sick leave from her doctor and escaped professional life for the day. It is set near the Institut du Monde Arabe—the novel deliberately places this episode within the Parisian topography that stages the Arab world as a cultural backdrop. It stands between passages about desire (the longed-for reunion with Latifah) and the later struggle with her origins and faith. Thus, it belongs to a series of moments in which Leyla's outwardly proclaimed sovereignty is undermined from within, comparable to the praying man on the bus who serves as "the first warning call of the day." The bookstore here is such a touchstone, against which her self-presentation cannot be sustained.
The strength of this passage lies in its concise and unpretentious condensation of the novel's identity theme. The alienation from one's native language is not explained, but rather made physically tangible: the stomachache and the impulse to flee translate an abstract problem of belonging into immediate sensation. At the same time, the passage exposes the label of "bilingualism" as a performance that works for a French audience but collapses in the face of one's own heritage—the bookstore becomes the place where the pretense ends. The retreat to the children's section ironically intensifies the shame: the adult woman fails where children begin. The inserted reflection on the scholars who have "translated into the language of God" elevates the personal to the fundamental and links the linguistic gap with the religious dimension that permeates the entire novel. Thus, the scene exemplifies Aljalis's method of unfolding profound questions of belonging within a seemingly casual, everyday setting.
Summary of the novel's plot
L'Ecstasis Monia Aljalis's novel depicts a single day in the life of Leyla, a young woman of Arab-Muslim descent living in Paris. The novel opens the morning after a night of heavy drinking: Leyla wakes up in disheveled sheets, the man from the previous night has left, and disgust, shame, and physical exhaustion mingle with the mechanical routine of waking up. From her window, she observes the suburbs with their high-rises, pigeons, old men, and mothers in abayas. Instead of going to work at an advertising agency, she gets a doctor's note, feigning depression—a deception she feels necessary to escape her alienating professional life.
Throughout the day, Leyla roams the city, its bars, its streets, encountering a cast of friends, lovers, and peripheral figures. On the bus, a praying old man crosses her path and is perceived as "the first warning of the day"—a recurring motif: religious guilt repeatedly intrudes upon her sensual self-assertion. Conversations with her friend Clelia revolve around men, desire, and the question of whether sex ever becomes love; a meeting with her writer friend Ivan exposes her self-deception when he accuses her of wanting to be subversive without actually being so. Throughout, there are hints of a troubled relationship with food, the compulsion to belong, and the fear of being alone.
The narrative builds towards night, where intoxication, desire, and a struggle with origins and faith culminate. The final section shifts the perspective to Leyla's mother, who at daybreak performs her ritual washing and prayer, imploring God for the happiness of her estranged children. This juxtaposition—the daughter's nocturnal ecstasy and the mother's morning prayer—forms the final chord. The novel ends with the call to "Réveille-toi, Leyla" and a hint of reassurance, the "dawn of all new beginnings."
Sacralization of the profane
The title and the preceding Hallaj quote about mystical self-dissolution in God frame an event that ostensibly consists of sex, alcohol, and fatigue. How closely Aljali's lust and liturgy are intertwined is revealed in Leyla's morning recollection of the previous night (Chapter 1): The man quietly "takes care of" her while outside the workers prepare their muscles for the day, and as he plays on her like a drum, one stroke follows, then two, twenty, a hundred, cries and fervor, "a gospel that tears the heart apart," the mind trembles boundlessly until finally "the teeming silence of the desert" descends; a drop of sweat, a drop of semen, a drop of saliva mingle between her legs, and in the morning she rereads the scene, exhausted and transformed. The passage thus concretely demonstrates the claim inherent in the title: Physical pleasure is consistently narrated within the register of religious and musical-liturgical ecstasy. The “gospel” and the “boundless trembling of the spirit” evoke spiritual experience, while the “silence of the desert” conjures a mystical emptiness after the climax—a vocabulary otherwise reserved for the experience of God. At the same time, the conclusion with the three bodily fluids radically grounds the sublime in the profane. This tension is programmatic: the ecstasy of the title is not either sacred or profane, but both at once, and the text leaves open whether the pleasure is a distorted search for transcendence or its conscious desecration.
Identity between two models
Leyla finds herself caught between her traditional Arab-Muslim family and a French milieu of assimilation, unable to commit to either model. The professional aspect of this tension is encapsulated in the description of her work (Chapter 2): Leyla is described as "emancipated, assimilated, integrated into society"—society, after all, has to do something so that she doesn't "explode like a good fella" in front of company headquarters; having completed eleven years of university studies only to sign apology letters from night owls is laughable; her family came to work, otherwise there would have been no place for her, and she was accused of "taking bread away from others"; she earns 2200 euros a month, "not bad for an Arab woman," and everyone is proud of this child who made it, studied, and can send emails. Here, the tension of her migration biography is condensed into bitter irony. The terms "emancipated, assimilated, integrated" are not celebrated as achievements, but rather exposed as labels that mask a continuing ascription of otherness—evident in the reference to "the bread of others" and the condescending phrase "for an Arab woman." Leyla's professional advancement appears as the hollow fulfillment of a promise of integration, one that ties the family's pride to minimal markers. Her truancy can thus be interpreted as a rejection of both assigned roles: neither the traditional daughter nor the presentable assimilated woman. The bookstore scene quoted above (Chapter 5) complements this finding from a linguistic and cultural perspective, and the final juxtaposition with the praying mother makes the drifting apart of the generations fully apparent.
Body image, shame, and disordered eating
The text repeatedly reveals a problematic relationship to one's own body, in which desire and self-deprecation are intertwined. This is particularly evident in the café scene with Ivan (Chapter 19): Ivan drinks his beer "like water," while Leyla, who dislikes beer because it bloats her stomach, fears that people will notice she eats little and therefore has to eat three fries to feign an appetite; it is frowned upon to have no appetite, as this means being ill; she is glad when someone else refuses to eat because it distracts the "eyes of a cannibal" from her; she never knows what to eat, nothing stays in her "overwatered bowels," and she feels good when she forgets to eat—whereupon an inserted verse reads: "She is afraid of the Last Judgment." The passage closely intertwines the disturbed relationship with food with shame and social control. Food here is not a pleasure, but a stage for surveillance: the scrutinizing gaze of others becomes that of a "man-eater," the meal a covert operation. Significantly, well-being lies in forgetting about food—abstinence appears as both control and relief. The abruptly inserted verse about the Last Judgment links this physical self-denial to religious anxiety and suggests that the disciplining of the body is not only socially but also spiritually grounded.
Guilt and the recurring “warning call”
The motif of the "rappel" pervades the day as an internalized instance of conscience. Its first and most striking appearance is the praying man on the bus (Chapter 3): A man in a beige djellaba boards, his skin dried from constant washing, musk and incense overpowering all other scents; he holds a prayer chain and wears a white cap with dotted patterns "like planets around his skull," he murmurs softly, "he does not speak alone," and the beads slide slowly; at one point he raises his gaze to the rebellious youths, whereupon there is immediate silence and heads bow; then he looks at Leyla and smiles at her, and she glimpses, "a vibrating knife in the sternum," her future punishment in those eyes of humble wisdom, the eyes of a "Saharan genius"—summarized in the line "First warning of the day." The praying stranger functions as an embodied instance of conscience, establishing a spiritual order without a word. His mere gaze disciplines the young people and strikes Leyla like a knife – religious guilt becomes a physical experience, not merely an argument. The designation as the "first" warning establishes a structural principle: throughout the day, such reminders of her origins and faith intrude upon Leyla's claim to freedom. Remarkably, the guilt is not imposed from the outside, but experienced as an internalized voice that transforms even a fleeting encounter into an act of judgment. The novel thus reveals the enduring influence of faith even where it seems practically abandoned.
Form as program: a prose-poetry hybrid
The text constantly shifts between dense narrative prose, interspersed stanzas, and chat dialogues without quotation marks. The productivity of this shift is demonstrated by the exchange with Clelia (Chapter 8): embedded within the prose is a chat dialogue in stanza form, in which Leyla writes that she really likes the musician she has "blocked"; during the concert intermission, he stood next to her, she couldn't open her mouth, and, "flooded with fear," almost ran away, without knowing where this "bastard fear" that gripped her throat had come from—while in between, in pure prose, the narrative reflects that Leyla's alleged desire for solitude is merely a means of concealing her gaps, "a pain like that of a musician," because she misses the voice of others. This passage exemplifies the novel's formal montage: terse, register-free chat speech without punctuation stands directly alongside dense, vividly descriptive narrative prose. The shift in register formally reflects Leyla's inner turmoil—the outwardly casual self-presentation in the chat and the underlying vulnerability revealed only in the narrative text. By omitting quotation marks and framing the dialogue like a poem, the boundary between everyday language and poetry blurs, thus fulfilling Aljalis's program of a "poetic and raw" language. Form is therefore not mere packaging, but a vehicle of meaning: it carries the thematic tension between facade and inner life, between the profane and the condensed.
The five outlined approaches interlock: What Aljalis evokes in the title and the Hallaj motto as mystical ecstasy reappears in desire as well as in guilt, disordered eating, and linguistic homelessness. Leyla's day is a pilgrimage without a destination, in which every step oscillates between self-assertion and a warning, between desire and shame. The hybrid form—prose, verse, and chat—endures the contradictions without resolving them. The bookstore scene condenses this process on a small scale by making an everyday act of shame a cipher for an entire problem of belonging. The final shift to the praying mother and the call "Réveille-toi, Leyla" ultimately suggest that the sleepless night leads less to a solution than to the possibility of a new beginning—the "dawn of all new beginnings."
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
