Global Village Storyteller

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya Explores Muslim Culture

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, March 31, 2011

What matters in the end is the truth.” So begins Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s novel The Storyteller of Marrakesh: A Novel (Norton, 2011). But within a few sentences, that simple statement has been deftly tangled—”the truth is precisely that which is transformed the instant it is revealed, becoming thereby only one of many possible opinions”—and set on its ear: “In other words, there is no truth.”

Welcome to the quicksilver mind of Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya. The Rhinebeck-based author has fashioned a narrative as intricate, mysterious, and beautiful as the mosaics created by one of its characters.

Every year, a storyteller named Hassan gathers an audience in the fabled Jemaa el Fna of Marrakesh, Morocco, to recount the tale of a charismatic foreign couple who disappeared one long-ago night from this very place. To the kaleidoscopic accompaniment of the square’s nighttime drummers, dancers, acrobats, and kif smokers, Hassan unfurls his story, joined by listeners who offer their own contradicting accounts.

But Hassan is more than the teller of this tale. His lovestruck brother Mustafa is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, and as flashbacks illuminate scenes from their childhood and coming of age, the storyteller slowly becomes not just the weaver of his oral tapestry, but one of its principal threads.

Roy-Bhattacharya’s rising literary career may follow a similar pattern. His first novel The Gabriel Club (Granta Books, 1998) confounded American publishers by taking place not in his native India, but in Budapest during the endgame of Soviet rule. The Storyteller of Marrakesh: A Novel launches a trilogy celebrating diverse Muslim cultures: The Book of Baghdad is set in that city’s ancient book market, and Like a Perfect Circle Drawn on Water explores the arts of Persian calligraphy and Sufi poetry. Other works in progress include a reimagined Antigone set in war-torn Afghanistan and a 2,400-page epic about Germany between wars; he’s plotting another novel set in glasnost-era St. Petersburg.