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Bezig met laden... Gertrude (Interlink World Fiction)door Hassan Najmi
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. From what little I know (very little!) Najmi is a poet of exquisite images. These dance through this story as well: red flowers on a dress, the way eyes drop and gestures fail, waves of light and beams of water. Although I am feeling unworthy to comment, I am wondering whether some of the breathy power might not survive translation; also the novel seems, at times, to struggle for breath in the tight frame of a single narrator. This unnamed narrator attempts to write the book that his old friend (who remains only as a memory himself) could not write of his memories of a encounter with Gertrude Stein (this is Najmi's fiction, although based on a few notes in Toklas' diary concerning an unnamed Moroccan) . Throughout, Picasso's portrait of Stein stands as an alternate to the portrait compiled from the friend's passionate memory. Najmi is constantly playing with the question of what an artist is doing when observing, remembering, describing, representing. Towards the end of the book, the narrator notes that most people think writing is simply "...to live life, remember it all, describe it on paper, and that's it!" Clearly, this is no more true of Najmi writing of the Moroccan shadows in Gertrude Stein's circles than it was of Picasso's portraits. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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As Hassan Najmi's acclaimed novel begins, our unnamed narrator befriends an elderly man, Muhammad, who, as a young man, worked as a tour guide in the city of Tangier. Muhammad tells the narrator about his most famous clients, the renowned Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice Toklas, who--on the recommendation of Henri Matisse--hired Muhammad as their guide when they visited Morocco. Now close to death, Muhammad begs the narrator to take his papers and write his life story. We learn that Muhammad accepted Stein's invitation to visit her in Paris. He participated in Stein's famous salon, meeting the many luminaries in Stein's circle. As the narrator is drawn into Muhammad's story, he finds himself also drawn to a beautiful African-American woman who becomes as interested in the story of Stein's visit to Morocco as she is in the young Moroccan who is researching it. Together they continue their quest into the past to rediscover Stein, in a novel that bursts with different varieties of passion at the hands of a master storyteller and poet. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)892.7Literature Literature of other languages Middle Eastern languages Arabic (Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan)LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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