The Italian

Description

At his father's funeral, to the great consternation of all present, Abdel Nasser beats the imam who is celebrating the funeral rite. The narrator, a childhood friend of the protagonist, retraces the story of "the Italian" from his days as a free and rebellious adolescent spirit to the leader of a student movement and then affirmed journalist. Those were crucial years in Tunisia, years of great tension, change, and repression. Against this background full of revolutionary ferments stands the tormented love story between Abdel Nasser and Zeina, a brilliant and beautiful philosophy student. Their dreams will unfortunately end up being wrecked under the ruthless gears of a corrupt and chauvinist society. Abdel Nasser's transformation from a young idealist with high hopes to a successful, but disillusioned and tired journalist is masterfully narrated in a stream of stories, digressions and flashbacks in which the narrative tension is always high. Winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Shukri Mabkhout was born in Tunis in 1962. He is head of the Manouba University, and on the editorial board of several journals. He is the author of several works of literary criticism, this is his first novel. Miled Faiza is a Tunisian-American poet and translator. Among his translations are the Booker Prize shortlisted novel Autumn, and Winter by Ali Smith. He teaches Arabic at Brown University. Karen McNeil has translated poems and short stories for Banipal and World Literature Today. The Italian is her first novel translation. She was a revising editor of the OxfordArabic Dictionary (2014) and is currently completing a Ph.D.

"An uncompromisingly modern and entirely atypical Arab novel."