التياس

التياس (Ettayes) is a 2022 collection of short stories in Tunisian dialect by Tahar Fazaa (الطاهر الفازع), published by Sindbad Tunisia — its own cover identifies it as "مجموعة قصصيّة باللغة الدارجة" (a short-story collection in the colloquial dialect), not a novel. It takes its title from the opening story: at a village celebration in the years before Tunisian independence, a beloved poet and singer falls in love at first sight with a woman who has just been divorced by her husband. Under an old custom — by which a woman divorced three times cannot return to her husband unless she first marries, and is then released by, another man — he becomes her intermediary husband, bound to her for a single night before she can be returned to the man who cast her out; what is meant to be a formality becomes, for him, a love permitted to last only until dawn. The stories that follow turn Fazaa's colloquial voice on everyday Tunisian life, blending humor with social and moral commentary. Reception has been mixed: reviewers have praised the collection's emotional depth beneath its plain-spoken surface, while others have found some of the later stories overly reliant on sarcasm.