It is the summer of 1969 in Essaouira, the city by the sea that the Berbers call Mugadur and was formerly known as Mogador. In ancient times, goods arriving from black Africa departed from here, but today Essaouira has lost its importance and is a city in decline, from which young people can’t wait to escape. Twenty-two-year-old Gianni is in Morocco “under the pretext of a thesis on the popular culture of North Africa under the direction of Professor Labulue of the University of Paris”. Until that moment, Martine, his girlfriend, had also accompanied him, but now she has left again: he will join her once he has collected more material on some trance and possession rites and on a ritual pilgrimage made every year by some Berber tribes . One day, while he is enjoying mint tea in a café in the centre, Gianni sees for the first time Aïssa, a seventeen-year-old with an extraordinary and somewhat effeminate beauty. From exchanging a few words at the coffee table to rolling around embraced in the sand naked and excited on the beach of Sidi Kaouki, sheltered from prying eyes by the ruins of the El Baroud fort, only a few hours pass (“Love? I don’t know what pushed me to go beyond love, as commonly understood as the call of a mixture of vital power and non-existence). At the Hotel des Iles, where the Italian is staying, they don’t let locals go up to their rooms in the company of foreigners. So Gianni and Aïssa impulsively decide to take the CTM bus to Marrakech…
The characters are almost the same as in the story Goodbye to Mogadorin turn the ideal sequel to Hotel Oasis, published in the late 1980s. The narrative is in flashback and is interspersed with chapters set in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the North African “summer of love” of the twilight of the Sixties, with young freaks who lost themselves in the ethereal and brutal beauty of the Moroccan desert, in the visions induced by hallucinogenic drugs and in the exploration of a new sexual identity, with the legends about more or less famous characters such as Jimi Hendrix, Julian Beck or Doctor Dick and with the spirit of William S. Burroughs and André Gide that hovered over the torrid embraces between tourists and young North Africans. On the other hand, the alienating experience of lockdown, the isolation that forces us to take life balances that are at least melancholic. The contrast between these atmospheres (and the respective seasons of the author’s life) is in some ways poignant, in any case merciless. And it doesn’t help that the first part of the novel takes off. The second part is better, much better, in which we talk about “strange and magical days, on a circular journey (dour) between the fields, the mountains, the desert and the sea”. Here the Salerno native Gianni De Martino, one of the founders of the cult magazine “Mondo Beat” and a leading figure of our local counterculture, really takes off as a narrator and the novel is enriched with fascinating anthropological and esoteric themes, while the chapters set in 2022 that close the book are colored with regret, bitterness and drama.
