Divorce Islamic Style
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Secret identities, criminal conspiracies, and forbidden love converge in this "whimsical and at times heartbreaking look" at the Muslim communities of Rome (The New York Times).
The Italian secret service believes that a group of Muslim immigrants is planning a terrorist attack. Christian Mazzari, a young Sicilian translator who speaks perfect Arabic, goes undercover in Rome's Egyptian neighborhood, Viale Marconi, to infiltrate the group. Posing as a recently arrived Tunisian in search of a job and a place to sleep, Christian soon meets Sofia, a young Egyptian immigrant whose arranged marriage is anything but fulfilling. While Christian attempts in vain to uncover terrorist activity, Sofia is on another kind of secret mission—in defiance of a husband who forbids her to work.
In alternating voices, Algerian-born Italian author Amara Lakhous examines the commonplaces and stereotypes of life in modern, multicultural Italy. Divorce Islamic Style mixes the rational and the absurd as it depicts the conflicts and contradictions of today's globalized world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lakhous (Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio) deftly satirizes political, cultural, and religious corruption in this clever comedy of errors. Sicilian narrator Christian Mazzari, code name Issa "the Tunisian," is an excitable "Arabist" student recruited by SISMI, Italian military intelligence in 2005, to infiltrate the Arab Muslim community in Rome and learn about "Operation Little Cairo" (Little Cairo being an "international calling center"). Issa shares narration duties with feisty Egyptian housewife Sophia, a call center patron chronicling her marriage to and multiple divorces from Said, who is called Felice (happy), the Islamic fundamentalist whom she derisively calls "the architect" (he has a degree in architecture but works in a restaurant). Secretly working as a hairdresser to save money for her sister Zeineb's reconstructive surgery after a botched female circumcision, Sophia walks a minefield between cultures: Islamic, Arab, Egyptian, Italian, and, eventually as she comes into contact with the handsome Issa that of "Tunisian" intelligence. Though a quick conclusion leaves a thread or two still untied, the novel still exposes what role personal corruption has played all along in Little Cairo's political, cultural, and religious intrigue. Issa, who cleaves to aphorisms, knows that "he wolf with a bad conscience thinks the worst of everyone," and it's a worthwhile satire that reveals how that wolf is made.
