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Sour Grapes (Paperback)
Zakaria Tamer; Translated by Alessandro Columbu, Mireia Costa Capallera
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R436
R353
Discovery Miles 3 530
Save R83 (19%)
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Set in the Syrian neighborhood of al-Qaweyq, Sour Grapes is a
collection of fifty-nine wry, satirical short stories loosely
connected by a cast of rotating characters living at society’s
margins. Tamer captures their everyday lives, weaving the attendant
cruelties and ironies of living under an oppressive regime with the
residents’ irreverence and small acts of defiance. Inspired by
the heroines of Arab mythology, the women of al-Qaweyq navigate the
patriarchal community with brash confidence and dark humor while
the younger generation of children inherit a bitter cynicism from
their fathers. Evoking under-ripened and immature fruit, the
collection’s title serves as a bittersweet metaphor for a world
that possesses the seeds of change but is unprepared for the
harvest. Considered a master of the short story, Zakaria Tamer is
one of the Arab world’s most prominent and widely read writers.
Columbu and Capallera’s fluid translation gives English readers
access to Tamer’s original and provocative voice
Wry, satirical and bawdy, Tamer's stories are always informed by
his dark view of humanity and of Syrian society in particular.
Through these glimpses of corrupt, fearful lives under a violent
dictatorship, it is possible to discern echoes of the storm that
has brought Syria to near-disintegration. Tamer's stories explore
taboos and power relations, bringing together religion, politics
and sexuality (often all at once) and implying that these forms of
oppression are connected. An assault is deflected when the victim
responds enthusiastically; a woman is spared stoning because the
streets have no cobbles, and her neighbours cannot afford any; A
comatose man awakens after years to find the regime unchanged, and
tries to escape back into the coma; a newborn baby curses the
hospital staff that delivers him, and when his mother tries to
quiet him, retorts: 'You're talking like our leaders!'; a man is
warned by two apples not to eat them, and anxiously questions them
about their political connections. Unsentimental and brilliantly
compressed, these sixty-three stories are the work of a virtuoso,
and translator Ibrahim Muhawi has found exactly the right deadpan
style with which to express them.
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