Title : Paper Lives - Rabih Alameddine - book
Summary :
Femina Prize - Foreign Novel 2016
A dazzling novel of playful erudition, celebrating the beauty and distress of Beirut, Paper Lives is a true declaration of love to literature.
Winner of the 2016 Prix Femina étranger
Aaliya Saleh, 72, with blue hair, has always rejected the constraints imposed by Lebanese society. In the shadow of the ancient walls of her apartment, she prepares for her favorite ritual. Every year on January 1st, after lighting two candles for Walter Benjamin, this irreverent and slightly obsessive woman begins translating into Arabic one of the works of her favorite novelists: Kafka, Pessoa, or Nabokov.
Both a refuge and a "blind pleasure," literature is the air she breathes, the air that makes her vibrate like this Chopin opus that she never stops listening to. It is surrounded by books, boxes filled with papers, and loose sheets of her translations that Aaliya feels alive.
Walking the streets, Aaliya remembers the smell of her bookstore, conversations with her friend Hannah, reading by candlelight while the war raged, the city on fire, the unpredictability of Beirut.
A dazzling novel of playful erudition, celebrating the beauty and distress of Beirut, Paper Lives is a true declaration of love to literature.
"Playful, intelligent and full of enthusiasm, Paper Lives is the cure for tasteless literature."
Newsday
"Sublime writing... sharp, intelligent, often sardonic... a tribute to literature."
The National
"One of the most beautiful and original female characters of recent years." Mathias Enard, Goncourt Prize 2015
Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the 2015 California Book Award
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EAN : 9782365692069
- Used book
- Book in good condition
- The book matches the photo
