Blood Test: A Novel (Middle East Literature In Translation) - Softcover

Beydoun, Abbas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815609124 ISBN 13: 9780815609124

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Widely known throughout the Arab world as a leading poet, journalist, and literary critic, Abbas Beydoun’s writing is infused with the politics and culture of his native Lebanon. In Blood Test, his only novel, Beydoun recounts the efforts of a young man to explore his own personal history and identity through his encounters with the family and friends that surround him. The sudden death of his father propels him to follow the physical and psychological traces he left behind, a journey that raises as many questions as it answers. The young man’s search for a sense of belonging and rootedness is reflected in the reader’s own experience, as the narration travels in time and place covering two continents and several generations.
Max Weiss’s fluid translation effortlessly conveys Beydoun’s impassioned language and textured storytelling. Blood Test is a passport to places both real and imagined, leaving readers enriched by their travels.

About this title

About the Author:

Abbas Beydoun is the author of eleven collections of poetry and one novel. He is the cultural editor of the cultural supplement of the Beirut daily newspaper As-Safir.

Max Weiss is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

From Publishers Weekly:

A murky first novel by Lebanese poet and journalist Beydoun follows a young man's obsession with his dead uncle along his journey to manhood. The narrator is a young student who suddenly finds himself the head of his household after the deaths of his sickly father, his brother in an untimely accident and his legendary uncle some years earlier. Into the mix comes Safia, once engaged to the narrator's uncle and now married to a rich artist, Hashim, and with a young daughter. As the narrator sifts through his father's effects, speculating on his own past and his competitive relationship with his brother, he finds himself attracted to the older Safia, partly out of his identification with his larger-than-life uncle. The two become lovers, but as Safia's relationship with her husband deteriorates, the narrator realizes their complicated familial ties prohibit him from running away with her. Except for the immediate drama of the love affair, Beydoun's novel consists primarily of stories within stories about family members whose significance is largely unclear to the reader. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0815609124
• ISBN 13: 9780815609124
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 122