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Firefly (Hardcover)
Jabbour Douaihy; Translated by Paula Haydar, Nadine Sinno
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R770
R647
Discovery Miles 6 470
Save R123 (16%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian
worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War. Firefly paints a searing
portrait of the city of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese
Civil War in the early 1970s, as seen through the eyes of its
simple, yet perplexing, protagonist, Nizam al-Alami. On Nizam's
national ID card, no religion is listed. Muslim by birth, he is
Christian by baptism. As a young boy, he found his way into an
orchard while playing, and its owners, Touma and Rakheema,
instantly fell for him and agreed to raise him as their own, as a
Christian, without much resistance from his Muslim parents. When he
is grown, Nizam makes his way to Beirut to study law. Unable to
bear the confines of the classroom, he abandons college to explore
the city as he pleases. His apartment soon becomes a meeting place
for his communist comrades, and he falls in love with Janan, the
tormented artist whose dark paintings prophesy the city's bloody
future. When Beirut explodes, and the city is divided into a
Christian East and a Muslim West, Nizam's apartment turns into a
hideout for armed militiamen, and Burj Square is emptied of
everything except the Martyrs' Statue that bears witness to the
city's most difficult moments. Nizam, too, bears witness, as he
sees the corpses of the civil war's victims pile up. Jabbour
Douaihy takes us through Nizam's adventures and struggles as he
faces stigmatization, homelessness, and violence in a society that
considers him an outsider. Like the light-producing, charismatic
fireflies that captured his imagination and eluded him as a child,
Nizam is the glimmer of hope epitomized by those who reject binary
identities in favor of the in-between. But how long, Douaihy asks,
can this glimmer of hope truly last?
I Saw Her in My Dreams is a powerful novel about interpersonal and
systemic violence, examined through the lens of a relationship
between Zahiyya, an anxious middle-class Omani artist, and Faneesh,
the Ethiopian domestic worker she hires. When Zahiyya's husband
Amer, a novelist, leaves for Zanzibar in search of his biological
mother, Zahiyya is left to confront her anxieties and prejudices.
Both Zahiyya and Faneesh begin to suffer a recurring nightmare,
prompting Zahiyya to read Fanheesh's diaries in search of answers.
Alone and afraid, Zahiyya reads excerpts from Amer's novel, written
from his father's diaries about living in Zanzibar, where he fell
in love with Amer's mother, a Zanzibari woman whose absence still
haunts him. Weaving between multiple perspectives and stories
within stories, the novel explores honestly-but without
sensationalizing or self-Orientalizing-the anti-Blackness that has
endured in the Arab world and elsewhere.
Rashid al-Daif's provocative novel Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?
takes an intimate look at the life of a recently married Lebanese
man. Rashoud and his wife struggle as they work to negotiate not
only their personal differences but also rapidly changing attitudes
toward sex and marriage in Lebanese culture. As their fragile bond
disintegrates, Rashoud finds television playing a more prominent
role in his life; his wife uses the presence of a television at her
parents' house as an excuse to spend time away from her new home.
Rashoud purchases a television in the hopes of luring his wife back
home, but in a pivotal scene, he instead finds himself alone
watching Kramer vs. Kramer. Without the aid of subtitles, he
struggles to make sense of the film, projecting his wife's behavior
onto the character played by Meryl Streep, who captivates him but
also frightens him in what he sees as an effort to take women's
liberation too far.
Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep? offers a glimpse at evolving
attitudes toward virginity, premarital sex, and abortion in Lebanon
and addresses more universal concerns such as the role of love and
lust in marriage. The novel has found wide success in Arabic and
several European languages and has also been dramatized in both
Arabic and French.
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