MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Literary Obscure Nominations April 2012 • The MR Literary Club

toomanybooks · 04-06-2012, 11:50 AM

I nominate Talismano. I have a link below to then Wikipedia page for the author and a summary of the book from the Kobo website. This book is published by Dalkey Archive, a really cool non-profit publishing house dedicated to publishing and keeping in print experimental and non-commercial books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelwahab_Meddeb

"Talismano
By Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jane Kuntz

A lush journey into a Tunisia of memory and imagination.
Talismano is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities—in particular, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was. Walking and writing, journey and journal, mirror one another to produce a calligraphic, magical work: a palimpsest of various languages and cultures, highlighting Abdelwahab Meddeb’s beguiling mastery of both the Western and Islamic traditions. Meddeb’s journey is first and foremost a sensual one, almost decadent, where the narrator luxuriates in the Tunis of his memories and intercuts these impressions with recollections of other cities at other times, reviving the mythical figures of Arab-Islamic legend that have faded from memory in a rapidly westernizing North Africa. A fever dream situated on the knife-edge between competing cultures, Talismano is a testament to the power of language to evoke, and subdue, experience."
From Kobo website($10.09)

04-06-2012, 11:50 AM	#4
toomanybooks Addict Posts: 302 Karma: 1039424 Join Date: Apr 2009 Device: Ipad, Ipod Touch, KIndle Fire	I nominate Talismano. I have a link below to then Wikipedia page for the author and a summary of the book from the Kobo website. This book is published by Dalkey Archive, a really cool non-profit publishing house dedicated to publishing and keeping in print experimental and non-commercial books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelwahab_Meddeb "Talismano By Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jane Kuntz A lush journey into a Tunisia of memory and imagination. Talismano is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities—in particular, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was. Walking and writing, journey and journal, mirror one another to produce a calligraphic, magical work: a palimpsest of various languages and cultures, highlighting Abdelwahab Meddeb’s beguiling mastery of both the Western and Islamic traditions. Meddeb’s journey is first and foremost a sensual one, almost decadent, where the narrator luxuriates in the Tunis of his memories and intercuts these impressions with recollections of other cities at other times, reviving the mythical figures of Arab-Islamic legend that have faded from memory in a rapidly westernizing North Africa. A fever dream situated on the knife-edge between competing cultures, Talismano is a testament to the power of language to evoke, and subdue, experience." From Kobo website($10.09)