Gertrude

As Hassan Najmi’s acclaimed novel begins, our unnamed narrator befriends an elderly man, Muhammad, who, as a young man, worked as a tour guide in the city of Tangier. Muhammad tells the narrator about his most famous clients, the renowned Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice Toklas, who—on the recommendation of Henri Matisse—hired Muhammad as their guide when they visited Morocco. Now close to death, Muhammad begs the narrator to take his papers and write his life story. We learn that Muhammad accepted Stein’s invitation to visit her in Paris. He participated in Stein’s famous salon, meeting the many luminaries in Stein’s circle. As the narrator is drawn into Muhammad’s story, he finds himself also drawn to a beautiful African-American woman who becomes as interested in the story of Stein’s visit to Morocco as she is in the young Moroccan who is researching it. Together they continue their quest into the past to rediscover Stein, in a novel that bursts with different varieties of passion at the hands of a master storyteller and poet.