Tangier Diaries, 1962-1979 FROM THE PUBLISHER
Princeton grad John Hopkins came to Tangier after adventures in Peru. In addition to the portraiture of the city and its inhabitants, Hopkins' life in Marrakech and his trips into Morocco's Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Spanish Sahara, Mauretania, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroun, Swaziland and Mozambique are chronicled in entries rich with detail. The glamour, mystery, poverty and opulence of Tangier, the country of Morocco and Africa jumps from every page. The author presents a huge and dizzying cast of writers, painters, socialites, trance dancers, eccentrics, party-givers, magicians, aristocrats, confidence men and expat residents from the early sixties through the late seventies. One encounters Paul and Jane Bowles, Barbara Hutton, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Princess Ruspoli, Malcolm Forbes, Tennessee Williams, Mohammed M'rabet, The Hon. David Herbert, Ira Bilankine, Ted Morgan, The Countess de Breteuil and her fabulous mud castle in Marrakech, The Lady Caroline Duff, Jim Wyllie, Elizabeth Vreeland, Jean Genet, Elizabeth David, Alec Waugh, Alfred Chester, Margaret Lane, Louise de Meuron, Adolfo de Velasco, Marguerite McBey and countless others. The Tangier Diaries includes eight pages of photographs, and is invaluable for anyone interested in Tangier and the colorful figures who have lived there.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
When Hopkins graduated from Princeton in 1960, he wasn't interested in the conventional routes of graduate study or a Wall Street career. Instead, he traveled, first to South America where he and a Princeton friend had visions of making money in coffee. When that fell through, the two wandered around Europe, stumbling eventually on teaching jobs at an American school in Tangier. There, they found a community of artists and socialites more accepting than most because of the remote locale. During his time in Morocco, Hopkins managed to enter into two major romances, befriend fellow ex-pat novelists William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, and even write several novels. As Hopkins gains experience, the voice he uses to catalogue his life in Tangiers changes, from his first perceptions as a perpetual tourist ("These urchins won't leave us alone. Do these diminutive hustlers ever sleep?") to an insider's appreciation of the land and the culture"I know that that landscape and the Moroccans in it represent something totally human, something harmoniously timeless to which I give my full allegiance." The colorful references to actual occurrences take second place to describing the mysticism and primitive beauty of North Africa. Those musings and the sometimes overripe prose give the book some of the quality of an 18th-century European travelogue. There are times, though, when Hopkins shows that he is conscious of this escapist excess: "Here there is no pressure, no anxiety. I simply put down the words and they trickle out. Ideas recorded here do no violence to my soul.... How sweet the peace is." (Feb.)
Kirkus Reviews
A writer's perfunctory yet absorbing diary of his life in Tangiers. Lifelong ﾽmigrﾽ and novelist Hopkins (The Flight of the Pelican, 1984 etc.), fresh out of Princeton and convinced that Wall Street and the professions were not for him, jaunted around South America and Europe before finally pitching up in Morocco. There, on and off for 17 years, he pursued with gathering success his literary ambitions. Cheap, exotic, permissive, Morocco (especially Tangiers) was one of the places to be in the early '60s, especially for writers and artists and American millionaires. Now it all seems almost mythic, a great, outlandish American Bloomsbury. Hopkins delivers all the expected goodies and more: the requisite desert meditations ("This is what the desert does. It leaves you with a terrible nostalgia for the purity you left behind. That purity was you"), the kef-censed evenings in the kasbah, the celebrity sightings. Beyond the usual literary suspects such as his friends Paul and Jane Bowles and William Burroughs, we have everyone from Malcolm Forbes to Tennessee Williams to the Beatles. Though a graceful, laconic stylist, Hopkins is not a natural diarist. He lacks the necessary daily dedication, curiosity, and self-absorption. Months can pass between entries, creating any number of bothersome and confusing lacunae. And though he may have mingled with the rich and famous, Hopkins wastes no time elaborating. He is content, for example, merely to note that he attended a wild party where he met the Beatles, and leave it at that. Finally, in 1979, Hopkins made the difficult decision to leave Tangiers and move to England with his new, pregnant wife. It would be cold and gray, but at least he'd becloser to the English-language publishing worldwithout having to return to America. (photos, not seen)
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