Novel
Adama
العدامة
Turki al-Hamad · 1997
Synopsis
In Dammam, at the end of the 1960s, Hisham al-Abir, a secondary-school pupil from a middle-class family, feels cramped in his quiet neighbourhood. A great reader, he devours forbidden books, Marxist ones among them, and forms his political ideas at the time of the debates on Nasser and Arab nationalism. With his best friend, Adnan, he is recruited by a clandestine group linked to the Baath party, and he is caught up in the struggle for change in an Arabia divided between tradition and new wealth.
Context
First part of the trilogy Atyaf al-aziqqa al-mahjura, continued by al-Shumaisi and al-Karadib, the novel appeared in Beirut from Dar al-Saqi, in 1997 according to the BnF and Al Jazeera, in 1998 according to NPR. Banned in Saudi Arabia as in other countries of the region, it nonetheless sold more than twenty thousand copies. Readers see in it a partly autobiographical portrait and criticise an uneven pace and the mixing of dialects in the dialogues. Translated into English by Robin Bray in 2003, it is the author's first book to appear in that language.
Who it is for
A novel of political education, with explicit scenes; it exists in English, German and Turkish, not in French.
Prizes and reception
NPR broadcast Alan Cheuse's review of it in 2003, on a neighbourhood boy's passage to the intellectual who doubts.
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