R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
A review by Hisham Matar, for The Guardian, May 11th, 2019
Set three years into the Syrian civil war, the novel’s plot is compellingly simple. Bolbol, the deeply sensitive and conflicted protagonist, has just lost his father. He gathers his two older siblings, Hussein and Fatima, to help him honour their father’s last wish – to be buried in Anabiya, the family’s ancestral village, about 350km north of Damascus. Ordinarily, the journey would take under five hours; if it weren’t for the sad occasion it would be a pleasurable drive, with …
In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told.
Following the life story of two inseparable friends, Hannah and Zakaria, from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century in Aleppo, No one prayed over their graves, reveals a buzzing, multiconfessional, libertine, tolerant society, coming to grips with the various forms of death.
A detective story set on the background of family and sectarian feuds, The king of India, explores with the right dose of irony, the meaning of attachment to the land.
Insightful and sarcastic, this is the powerful story of a young man diagnosed with leukemia. This debut novel by young Saudi writer Aziz Mohammed tackles modern Arab life.
A review by Financial Times, May 10th 2019
Despite its relentlessly bleak subject matter, Death Is Hard Work is intensely readable. As the pages turn, one is impelled to keep up with the al-Salim siblings as they race against time…
Review by Jerome Avenas, for Toute la Culture, April 29th, 2019
Published by Éditions Gallimard in the collection “Du monde entier”, the novel by Dima Wannous, a Syrian writer born in 1982, is an impressive text on the trauma of war, memory and writing. An urgent read.
A man and a young woman meet in the waiting room of a psychiatrist under the eye of Layla, the medical secretary. Sulayma and Nassim consult for anxiety disorders: anxiety, panic attacks, self-mutilation but especially “fear of fear”, insidious and vertiginous disease which is the “fear of having …
April 2019, La Viduite.
The fear of fear, the vertiginous duplication of fiction, a story that merges with a reality whose unbearable horror is then revealed. By dipping into the psyche of a disturbed woman, by the exact restitution of her obsessions and gestures, Dima Wannous manages to draw a sadly faithful portrait of contemporary Syria. With its carnal precision, “The frightened” appears like an immense novel about human fear and mechanisms of defense.
Review by Kerenn Elkaïm for Livres Hebdo, April 2019
« La mémoire, soit elle existe, soit elle n ‘existe pas. Soit tu te réconcilies avec elle, soit tu t’en détournes. » Sulayma ne parvient pas à la chasser. Elle songe à Nissim, « ce jeune homme étrange aux os protubérants. » L’héroïne le croise dans un lieu improbable, la salle d’attente de leur psy.
