Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is Laila Lalami’s first novel, published in 2005.
Lalami had immigrated from Morocco and was working as a conceptual linguist in Los Angeles. She was “always hungry for news about Morocco,” and one day read about the collapse of a fishing boat in the Strait of Gibraltar and the resulting death of fifteen immigrants: “The news was relegated to the bottom of Le Monde’s online page—fifteen Moroccan immigrants had drowned while crossing the Straits of Gibraltar on a fishing boat. They had left Tangier on a summer night, trying to navigate the short distance—only ten miles—that separates their homeland from Spain, and from the rest of Europe, where they hoped to make a new life for themselves. The boat was overloaded and ill equipped to handle the strong Mediterranean currents, and it capsized a couple of miles away from the coast. There were no survivors… I thought at first that the disaster was an isolated incident, a blip, a bizarre turn of events. Over time, however, the incidents seemed to multiply. Nearly every week in the summer of 2001 there was a report about arrests by the coast guards on either side of the Mediterranean.”
She began doing research on people like those whom she read about, people who would undertake such a dangerous journey and pay great sums of money to do so, all with the slim hope of success both in the journey and in their destination. She did not struggle in Morocco the way others did, but she explained that “back home, I never had to look very hard or very far to find the kind of misfortune that drives people to desperate acts.” In her essay “So to Speak,” Lalami explained what finally drove her to write a novel and seek publication: “I have always written, because I have always had the urge to tell stories, but I cannot pinpoint the exact time when I decided that I should try to be published. I know now that it had something to do with reading work after work in which men of my race, culture, or religious persuasion were portrayed as singularly deviant, violent, backward, and prone to terrorism, while the women were depicted as silent, oppressed, helpless, and waiting to be liberated by the kind foreigner. I think I had had enough of ‘surrogate storytellers.’”
Hope received mostly positive reviews and was a bestseller. It was also a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the John Gardner Fiction Prize.
