International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Fractured Destinies (Hoopoe Fiction)
A novel that juxtaposes the Holocaust and the Nakba to ask about memory, trauma, and the possibility of reconciliation. It moves across multiple perspectives and revisits history from within.
Work Information
It places two tragedies in dialogue to rethink memory and reconciliation.
Destinies centers on Palestinian exile and the wish to return, linking individual fate with historical violence. Its structure, which reads history as a bundle of many lives, is memorable.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Hoopoe
- Published
- 2018-04-01
- Pages
- 257 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.95 x 2.03 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9789774168628
- ISBN-10
- 9774168623
- Price
- 3605 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Historical
Palestinian-Armenian Ivana eloped with a British doctor in the 1940s, in the midst of the Nakba, and emigrated to England. Over half a century later, her daughter Julie has been tasked with her dying wish: to take her ashes back to their old home in Acre. With her husband Walid, they leave London and embark on a journey back to their country of birth. Written in four parts, each as a concerto movement, Rabai al-Madhoun's pioneering new novel explores Palestinian exile, with all its complex loyalties and identities. Broad in scope and sweeping in its history, it lays bare the tragedy of everyday Palestinian life.
Rabai al-Madhoun is a Palestinian writer and journalist, born in al-Majdal, in southern Palestine in 1945. His family went to Gaza during the Nakba in 1948 and he later studied at Cairo and Alexandria universities, before being expelled from Egypt in 1970 for his political activities. He is the author of the acclaimed The Lady from Tel Aviv, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010, and has worked for a number of Arabic newspapers and magazines, including al-Quds al-Arabi , Al-Hayat , and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat . He currently lives in London, in the UK. Paul Starkey , professor emeritus of Arabic at Durham University, won the 2015 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. He has translated a number of contemporary Arabic writers, including Edwar al-Kharrat, Youssef Rakha, and Mansoura Ez-Eldin.
Reviews
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Arrived quickly. Good condition and a novel keen to read. More should be written factually or fictionally about Palestine and the tragic facts.
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So disappointing to see that a book that yells out blinding hatred towards Jews and Israelis, is full of historic and present day falsehoods, and makes no attempt at reconciliation towards the future, earns such credit by the Arab literary world! Literature ought to expand the reader’s vision, NOT narrow it down to a single dimensional reflection of “reality”. I truly read this book with a hope of a positive enlightening experience. Instead, realized, peace and mutual understanding is still a dream to be realized by younger Israelis and Palestinians with liberal, open minded forth sight. In our lifetime??? Reading this book makes me less optimistic.
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It's a fascinating book
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Jottings in a journal pretending to be fiction Self indulgent mention of himself. Is it autobiography or stories of many Palestinians? A nod to Jewish suffering but mostly stereotyping Arabs and Jews. Strange old fashioned but not in a good way. Other Palestinian and Israeli writers much more engaging. Accurate history thrown into a mess