Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2001

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Literary Devices

Flat Character

A flat character is one who undergoes little substantial change throughout a story, and who has few complex, developed feelings. Never experiencing noteworthy emotional development during a narrative, a flat character tends to lack in internal conflict.

In Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, all of the characters except Moses are flat. Schmitt gives the boy’s nameless parents only simplistic emotional traits—so few as to be enumerated on one hand—make them less rich characters than hastily sketched types (the depressed son of Holocaust victims, the unhappy wife who married only to flee her parents). Moses’s parents matter in the work only in that they created him and have had profound effects on him.

Monsieur Ibrahim is also a completely flat character, whose infinite beneficence is a similarly non-nuanced approach to describing character. While essential to the plot development, Monsieur Ibrahim doesn’t undergo change. Rather, he enters the story line as an avatar of goodness, whose function it is to interact with Moses and effectuate life-altering changes in him.

Humor

Schmitt injects hearty doses of humor into Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, primarily to introduce levity into a gloomy situation. Schmitt’s use of humor typically recalls the novella’s theatrical origins: Its fast-paced witty dialogue and stage-ready physical humor want to elicit laughs in a live audience.

The work opens with a comedic image: 11-year-old Moses smashing his piggy bank to collect enough change to visit to a brothel. This instantly creates a lighthearted tone to counteract the depressing quality of Moses’s circumstances. The droll scenario continues: When the sex worker remarks that Moses ought to give her a small gift, the boy rushes home and grabs his teddy bear, clearly an odd offering to bestow on a grown sex worker.

Much of the novella’s humor comes from its patronizing and demeaning descriptions of women. In one instance of situational comedy occurs when Monsieur Ibrahim outrageously overcharges French icon Brigitte Bardot, who’s starring in a film being shot in Moses’s neighborhood, for a bottle of water. When she challenges his wildly inflated price by asking if water has become a rarity, Monsieur Ibrahim, flashing a radiant smile, replies, “It’s not the water that is rare, Miss. It’s real stars” (11), charming the famous actress with his flattery.

In another example, when Moses visits his favorite sex worker, a male client who has stolen her colleague’s purse comes dashing down an alleyway as the aggrieved woman yells after him. By reflex, Moses sticks out his foot to trip the thief, thereby rescuing the handbag and becoming the hero of the day. This incident’s humor doesn’t stop at the absurdity of the situation: Afterwards, the thankful woman wishes to reward the boy with “a freebie,” which Moses unwillingly accepts as he recalls Monsieur Ibrahim’s advice to “not aggravate a woman” (13), which Moses clearly takes out of context. As a result, the boy’s favorite becomes jealous and, in turn, proposes to also perform for free. These jokes rest on easy sexist jabs—that women would fight for the opportunity to sleep with an 11-year-old, that they are instantly jealous of one another, and that they are generally stupid.

The humor moves the protagonist’s tragic circumstances to the novella’s background, elevating the mood of his work such that its readers/audience experience gaiety as part of their takeaway.

Colloquialism

Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran is a work rife with colloquialism—informal language whose conversational style serves to ground the reader/audience within a certain slice of time and geographical space. In addition to establishing a work’s setting, the use of colloquialism can confer elements of depth and genuineness to a setting or a character’s personality.

Perhaps the work’s most notable instance of colloquialism resides in its use of the French derogatory slang term “Arab”—a word originally indicating a speaker of Arabic—to designate a corner grocery mart. This slur references the assumption that the owner of such an establishment is necessarily an Arabic-speaking immigrant.

Other examples of colloquial language in the novella are examples of Moses’s crude language, which doesn’t seem to jibe with its portrayal of a young, sensitive boy who grown into a loving family man. After Monsieur Ibrahim swindles Brigitte Bardot and assists Moses in pocketing some of the meager pocket money his father gives him, Moses calls Monsieur Ibrahim “an expert in the art of screwing the world” (12). As Monsieur Ibrahim attempts to teach the boy how far a smile can take him, the latter notes, “Just to piss me off he started to smile” (15). Later, as Monsieur Ibrahim realizes that that he doesn’t know how to operate the car he’s just purchased, Moses declares, “Well, we’re up shit’s creek!” (41).

Given that Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran was originally written in French, some of its colloquialisms don’t translate directly into English. However, the translation does its best to render the French into informal English of a similar linguistic register. The result fleshes out a relatively gritty Parisian neighborhood of the 1960s.