Badawi
A Novel
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Poetically depicts a Bedouin boy's extended coming of age and the uneasy navigation of his transition from provincial Syria to the West." —Publishers Weekly
Published to wide critical acclaim in France, Badawi is Mohed Altrad's heartrending debut novel, inspired by the author's own narrative arc from Bedouin orphan to engineer and finally billionaire businessman.
In the Syrian desert, a young boy watches as his mother dies. She was a repudiated woman, abandoned by the boy's powerful father, leaving Maïouf to his scornful grandmother. She wants Maïouf to carry on Bedouin tradition as a shepherd. But from the first time he sneaks off to the white-walled schoolhouse to watch the other children learn, Maïouf envisions a different future for himself.
This is one extraordinary child's story of fighting for an education—and a life—he was never supposed to have, from a tiny desert village to the city of Raqqa, from the university halls of Montpellier on to the oil fields of Abu Dhabi. With each step forward, Maïouf feels the love of his youth—a steadfast young Syrian woman named Fadia—and the shifting, haunted sands of his native village pulling him back toward the past he thought he had left behind.
"In this tale of a boy caught between worlds, Altrad brings a sparse, lyrical quality to his prose that at times verges on the poetic." —Los Angeles Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Altrad's autobiographical debut novel, first published in France in 2002, poetically depicts a Bedouin boy's extended coming of age and the uneasy navigation of his transition from provincial Syria to the West. After the death of his mother, young Ma ouf must skirt the commands of his caretaker grandmother to attend school, first in his unnamed village and then in the city of Raqqa, where he proves to be a standout student. When he's offered a scholarship to attend college in France, it's less the subject, petrochemistry, that convinces him, than the chance to escape an uncertain future and make good on his potential. Swearing to return for his youthful love, Fadia, he sets off for Paris and changes his name to the aspirational Qaher ("the victorious"). But as time passes, the newfound Qaher struggles to reconcile his ambitions with a past and a promise that seem increasingly further away. Altrad, a construction magnate who's entered the Forbes billionaire list since the book's original publication, sketches his narrator's interior life with a sparseness that can dip into the programmatic but at its most elegant recalls Paulo Coelho. He reserves his more florid detours for the "velvet of the desert" and meditations on power and influence.
