A Tuareg youth ventures into trackless desert on a life-threatening quest to find the father he remembers only as a shadow from his childhood, but the spirit world frustrates and tests his resolve. For a time, he is rewarded with the Eden of a lost oasis, but eventually, as new settlers crowd in, its destiny mimics the rise of human civilization. The Libyan Tuareg author Ibrahim al-Koni, who has earned a reputation as a major figure in Arabic literature with his many novels and collections of short stories, has used Tuareg folklore about Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, to craft a novel that is both a lyrical evocation of the desert's beauty and a chilling narrative in which thirst, incest, patricide, animal metamorphosis, and human sacrifice are more than plot devices. In this novel, fantastic mythology becomes universal, specific, and modern.
About the Author :
Ibrahim al-Koni was born in Libya in 1948. A Tuareg who writes in Arabic, he spent his childhood in the desert and learned to read and write Arabic when he was twelve. He studied comparative literature at the Gorky Institute in Moscow and then worked as a journalist in Moscow and Warsaw. In 2010, he received the Arab Novel Award and dedicated the value of the prize to the children of the Tuareg tribes from which he originally hails. William Maynard Hutchins, the principal translator of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy (AUC Press 1990 - 92), has taught English, philosophy, Arabic, and Islamic Studies in Lebanon, Ghana, Egypt, and France. His most recent book is Tawfiq al-Hakim: A Reader's Guide.
Review :
"The novel has many levels, all attempting to unravel the complexities of obligation and customs that delineate how relationships are made between father and son, mother and son, then brother and sister, and man and woman, and how these relationships can prosper and endure with man living in a changing society. The desert setting is al-Koni's strength: its expanse, desolation and mystery is powerfully evoked. At once a personal story, the legend of a god-like mythical hero, a mystical tale of demons, dreams and metamorphosis, as well as a parable of human civilization."—BANIPAL
"A true journey into the human psyche."—Cairo Magazine
PRAISE FOR IBRAHIM AL-KONI
"A magnificent novelist”—Marilyn Booth, translator of the Man Booker International Prize Winner, Celestial Bodies
"One of the Arab world’s most innovative novelists”—Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania
"Imagine Cormac McCarthy’s savage lyricism in a Paul Bowles desert landscape and you begin to enter the bleakly beautiful world of this mesmerizing, fable-like novel.”—The Independent
"Al-Koni's story, simply and elegantly told, has all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy—or, better, all the tribulations of Job.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Al-Koni's novels are aesthetic renderings of the passions of the desert and of the rich legends and cosmology of his people. An encyclopedic writer who has digested mythologies of the ancient world and literature of the modern world, al-Koni has both a poetic bent and a mystical inclination." —Ferial Ghazoul, Al Ahram Weekly
