The Law of Inheritance - Couverture rigide

Abdellatif, Yasser

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0857425455 ISBN 13 : 9780857425454

Editeur : Seagull Books London Ltd, 2018

Synopsis

This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, and the first steps towards the making of a writer. But his story is not told in isolation: through his experiences and memories Yasser Abdellatif also unfolds the experiences of his Nubian family through the epochal changes the country underwent in the twentieth-century.

The symphonic four-part text presents us with narratives of Egyptian identity, a constant knitting and unravelling that moves us back and forth through time, as the reader slides and leaps across the shifting tectonic plates of Abdellatif's vignettes, his immaculately limpid prose poetry bringing forth the same questions. Nobody quite belongs in Cairo, it seems, but at the same time none of them belongs anywhere else: a relative emigrates from his Nubian village to the Cairo of the 1930s, where Italian fascists chase him through the streets and into a Maltese exile, only for him to return and make his way back South to the homeland he left. Another relative falls into religious esotericism and later madness, spinning away from Cairo and back to the wasteland of a village relocated after it had been flooded by the Aswan Dam. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, students fight security forces and binge on pills amid the dysfunctional remnants of a centralized state whose gravitational pull uprooted their parents and offered the possibility of assimilation into a national identity.

Through the clear sky of Abdellatif's novel his characters, the spaces they call home, their way-stations, and even the nation that contains them all are a murmuration of starlings, held together and apart forever.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Yasser Abdellatif is an award-winning Egyptian poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and novelist.


Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English based in Barcelona. He has translated several novels and prose works into English, including Haytham El Wardany's The Book of Sleep, Mohamed Kheir's Slipping, Iman Mersal's Traces of Enayat, and Ghassan Zaqtan's Strangers in Light Coats.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Seagull Books London Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0857425455
• ISBN 13: 9780857425454
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 2
• Nombre de pages: 112
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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