Prairies of Fever (Emerging Voices) - Softcover

Nasrallah, Ibrahim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156656106X ISBN 13: 9781566561068

Publisher: Interlink Books, 1998

Synopsis

Prairies of Fever is one of the foremost modernist novels of our time. A negation of chronology and sequence, a cohesve relationship between form and content, and a temporal parallelism of events, memories and dreams, give the novel a unique tenor. The central character, Muhammad Hammad, is a young teacher hired, like hundreds of others from all over the Arab world, to teach in a remote part of the Arabian peninsula. The novel recounts his harrowing struggle to retain any sense of identity at all in the bleak and alienating place he finds himself in, caught between the infinite expanse of desert and the intolerable narrowness of village life. His psychic and physical anguish, beset as he is by hallucinations, fantasies and the indifference of the villagers, is mirrored in the writing of the novel: time appears unfixed as the story jumps from past to future and back to the present; there is an eerie fusion of the animal and human worlds; and reality and fantasy become hard to distinguish. The result is an exceptional poetic novel, disturbing, evocative and deeply moving.

About this title

About the Author

Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian poet and novelist living in Amman, Jordan. He has published several novels and collections of poetry to date, and has won great acclaim throughout the Arab world.

Reviews

Through the narratives of two women and one man, Badr's collection of three short novels chronicles the recent experiences of Palestinians in the diaspora. At first, their respective experiences appear to be sheer fragments of the Middle East's turbulent history. One soon discovers, however, a personal dimension to the agony of alienation, resistance, and suffering experienced by three people in involuntary exile. At first a refuge, Beirut was quickly turned into hell by civil war, Israeli raids, and massacres. These novellas effectively represent war and suffering from the point of view of disenfranchised peoples, both Beirutis and Palestinians. Recommended for general readers. Though it is also filled with tension, Nasrallah's first novel is stylistically distinctive. When five faceless and enigmatic characters inform a young teacher named Muhammad Hamad of his own death and ask him to pay the burial costs, he is understandably perplexed. How can he be both dead and alive, here and now? Duality and negation of chronology are the central themes of this work, which unfolds in an isolated village of the Arabian peninsula. Muhammad's harrowing struggle concerns loss of identity and a quest for self amidst a strange and unfriendly milieu. A milestone in postmodern Arabic literature; recommended for larger collections.
- Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Interlink Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156656106X
• ISBN 13: 9781566561068
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160