Street of Thieves
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
"A tremendous accomplishment. . . . Énard's Zone is, in short, one of the best books of the year"—Daily Beast
Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangier not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.
Lakhdar's transformations—from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner—take place against some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.
If all of that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend—one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lakhdar opposes. A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Street of Thieves solidifies Énard's place as one of France's most ambitious and keyed-in contemporary novelists. This book may even suprpass Énard's earlier work, Zone, which Christophe Claro boldly declared to be "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."
Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucauld for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.
Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot, among others. She received a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of Énard's Zone along with a French Voices grant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set against a backdrop of rising Islamic extremism, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement, nard's (Zone) latest novel is a howling elegy for thwarted youth. The narrator, a young Moroccan called Lakhdar, spends his time in Tangier ogling girls with his friend Bassam and reading French detective novels. After he is caught naked with his cousin Meryem, his father disowns him. Enter Sheikh Nureddin, who offers Lakhdar a job as a bookseller for the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, whose under-the-table titles include pamphlets by Sayyid Qutb (an Egyptian writer and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and '60s who was executed in 1966 for plotting the assassination of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser), pointing to the group's nefarious aims. Unlike Bassam, who becomes radicalized by the group, Lakhdar spurns violence and finds escape in books. For Lakhdar, there are two Tangiers the one referenced by expat authors like Paul Bowles, and the one he himself inhabits; the latter is dismissed by Lakhdar as a simple "homophonic mistake." nard's relentless, incisive prose underscores his thesis that "men are dogs" incapable of determining their fate in the face of the political systems that control them.