Youssef Rakha

The Crocodiles

Ein Text in unglaublicher poetischer Dichte. Anstelle von Seitenzahlen gibt es nummerierte Paragraphen. Jeder Paragraph könnte als eigenes Bild stehen. Aneinandergereiht ergeben sie eine überaus dichte Beschreibung von jungen Dichtern, Aktivisten, Intellektuellen im Ägypten der neunziger Jahre bis zum Beginn der Arabischen Revolution. Es geht um Lebenskonzepte, um den Stellenwert von Dichtung, aber auch der eigenen Individualität. Es geht um das Finden eines Weges in einer Gesellschaft, die es zunehmend schwieriger macht, sich einen eigenen Weg zu bahnen. Und es geht um Freundschaft. Ein tiefgründiger und sehr lesenswerter Einblick in die intellektuelle Szene des zeitgenössischen Ägyptens. cn

Rezension von Ibrahim Farghali, in The Chronic, 19. März 2015, zu The Crocodiles und The Book of the Sultan's Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars: The Crocodiles is Rakha's second novel after his début, The Book of the Sultan's Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the city of Mars, in which he addressed the identity crisis created in Egyptian society by Wahhabism, which was imported into the country by Egyptians who went to work in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and returned home harboring a Bedouin set of values. Animated by a fraudulent religious discourse that viewed a caliphate as a viable alternative to the concept of the civil state, they transformed the population into something resembling zombies: a mindless mass manipulated to view religion as a single monolithic identity that consumes all other components of the self ...

Klappentext:

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011. The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha's provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forceful capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.

Über die Autorin / über den Autor:

Novelist, reporter, poet and photographer Youssef Rakha worked at Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo-based English-language newspaper, and was the founding features writer at the Abu Dhabi-based daily, the National. His work has appeared in English in the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, Parnassus, Aeon Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others. His photographs have been exhibited at the Goethe Institute in Cairo. Seven books by Rakha have appeared in Arabic. Concurrently with Seven Stories' release of The Crocodiles, Interlink is releasing The Book of the Sultan's Seal. These two books together represent his debut in English as a novelist. He lives in Cairo.

Preis: CHF 25.90
Sprache: Englisch (aus dem Arabischen von Robin Moder)
Art: Taschenbuch
Erschienen: 2013
Verlag: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 978-1-60980-571-5
Masse: ca. 150 S.

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