Street of Thieves
Language: English
Pages: 350
ISBN: 1940953014
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Recipient of three French literary awards, Mathias Énard's follow-up to the critically acclaimed Zone is a timely novel about a young Moroccan boy caught up in the turbulent events of the Middle East, and a possible murder.
Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangier not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father.
Lakhdar's transformations—from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner—take place against the backdrop of some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy.
If all that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend—one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lakhdar opposes.
A finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Street of Thieves solidifies Énard's place as one of France's most ambitious and keyed-in novelists of this century. This novel may even take Zone's place in Christophe Claro's bold pronouncement that Énard's earlier work is "the novel of the decade, if not of the century."
Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he received several awards for Zone—also available from Open Letter—including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre.
Charlotte Mandell has translated works from a number of important French authors, including Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Genet, Guy de Maupassant, and Maurice Blanchot, among others.
Tangier about twenty years ago—as if all those higher-ups were celebrating the fact of his death by accompanying him to the grave. Judit’s departure, after our three days and three nights, had plunged me into sadness and solitude; I fought them as usual, by work, reading until my eyes were burning with fever, and love poetry. I thought about the forty-five days that separated me from my trip. I looked at pages and pages of information about Tunisia, about the Revolution. Ibn Battuta just devoted.
Sun was still low, the hills of Morocco grew distant, glimmering, until they became green and white spots, promontories for giants, for Hercules, and the light seemed to play with its columns, on the side of Cape Spartel; then the Andalusian coast grew nearer, and then you thought of the expedition of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the conqueror of Spain, and of those Berbers who had defeated the Visigoths: I was commanding my own army of trucks, of old Renaults and Mercedes; together we would retake Grenada,.
Orange flowers; the pretty students from the applied arts school would come out and smoke cigarettes, sitting on the steps, and it was nice to watch them for a while; a few steps away, under the porticos of the old cloister, a group of bums guzzled beers and bottles of red; they too looked as if they found the place to their liking, just like the junkies on the Street of Thieves, the hash-sellers, the tourist-robbers, everyone liked this place—though of course for different reasons. The medieval.
Dresses, gypsies got out chairs and argued on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant where there dined, before normal hours, some Brits who, from the color of their shoulders, looked as if they’d spent the day at the beach—this whole little clutch of people took the air, taking advantage of the truce of evening, and you could’ve believed, going up and down the Rambla del Raval, that there were no antagonisms, no hatred, no racism, no poverty—the illusion didn’t last long; usually an Arab started.
Cardigan for the woman—seemed so drunk that they had to support each other, shoulder to shoulder, like the junkies on the Street of Thieves. In the back on the left, a window showed a glimpse of an orangey glow, an apocalyptic lighting, you couldn’t tell if it came from a sunset, a sunrise, or a light bulb in the stairwell. The whole group, in these giant proportions, gave off an extraordinary force; a movement rose diagonally from the smile of the guy in the hat to the hairy chest in the.