This "novel in verse" tells of an Old World man’s tribulations in the New World and revives as well a tradition somewhat lost from sight of a novel in verse, seen by the author as an "antidepressant" to poetry’s ectoplasmic days, languishing, exhausted by a breathless impressionism.

Mohammed Dib is one of the major and most prolific writers of Maghrebian literature. Among his many noted works are Who Remembers the Sea (a brutal description of the French war in Algeria) and The Talisman .