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Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep?
Rashid al-Daif's provocative novel Who's Afraid of Meryl Streep? takes an intimate look at the life of a recently married Lebanese man. Rashoud and his wife struggle as they work to negotiate not only their personal differences but also rapidly changing attitudes toward sex and marriage in Lebanese culture. As their fragile bond disintegrates, Rashoud finds television playing a more prominent role in his life; his wife uses the presence of a television at her parents' house as an excuse to spend time away from her new home. Rashoud purchases a television in the hopes of luring his wife back home, but in a pivotal scene, he instead finds himself alone watching Kramer vs. Kramer. Without the a...
What Makes a Man?
In 2003, Lebanese writer Rashid al-Daif spent several weeks in Germany as part of the “West-East Divan” program, a cultural exchange effort meant to improve mutual awareness of German and Middle Eastern cultures. He was paired with German author Joachim Helfer, who then returned the visit to al-Daif in Lebanon. Following their time together, al-Daif published in Arabic a literary reportage of his encounter with Helfer in which he focuses on the German writer’s homosexuality. His frank observations have been variously read as trenchant, naïve, or offensive. In response, Helfer provided an equally frank point-by-point riposte to al-Daif’s text. Together these writers offer a rare expl...
Passage to Dusk
Passage to Dusk deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a postmodern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. It is excellent fiction, written in a surrealistic mode, but faithful to the characters of the people of Lebanon, their behavior during the war, and their contradictions. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape. The English-language reader has not been much exposed to Lebanese literature in translation, and Rashid al-Daif is one of Lebanon's leading writers. He has been translated into eight languages, including French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Translator Nirvana Tanoukhi manages to preserve Daif's unusual, moving, and at times humorous style in her English rendition.
This Side of Innocence
This Side of Innocence, tells the story of one man's run-in with the secret police of his unnamed, war-torn country. The novel's real story, however, is about the deeply obscure events of a personal encounter with tyranny -- the tyranny of the instability and chaos of a country at war with itself and consequently preyed upon by internal and external threes. In the end, we are left with the story of how one man (or country) can, innocently, invent his own executioner.
Being of the Cedars
Rashid al-Daif was born in Lebanon in 1945. A university professor, Dr. al-Daif is also the best-selling author in Lebanon and has attracted the world s attention and received international acclaim. Al-Daif s work breaks the boundaries of genre. He is a unique voice merging Arabic and Western literary traditions, combining several contemporary writing trends to create his vision of a chaotic world, resultantly flooded with people with fragmented identities. He is the eccentric, neurotic voice screaming in the wilderness, blurring timelines to depict the angst of the human psyche. His novels are almost plot-less interior monologues highlighting the dominance of subjectivity. His quest is for answers that can t be found, for new tools to describe the ruptured world and new criteria upon which to build a definition of unified, complete identity. Al-Daif is a mirror bearer, encapsulating the contemporary Lebanese experience and zeitgeist. In his world issues of victimisation, oppression, guilt, innocence, truth and identity are like Russian roulette, tricky and complex dilemmas that are high risk and ever changing like the revolving bullet chamber.
Dear Mr Kawabata
A mesmerising and haunting tale of a young dying Lebanese man. In his mind he writes to Japanese writer, Mr Kawabata, arguing with his ideas of free will, living and dying. A bitter-sweet account of life in Beirut and how life could have been.
The Fragmenting Force of Memory
This study is about experimental forms of cultural production that situate and work through personal experiences of the civil war in Lebanon. It addresses selected works of literature, autobiography and memoir by Jean Said Makdisi, Rashid al-Daif, Elias Khoury and Mai Ghoussoub, and the civil war trilogy of documentary films by Mohamed Soueid. From a phenomenological hermeneutic perspective, the book is concerned with how they give accounts of themselves as remnants, leftovers and undigested remains of the civil war, and of related trajectories of ideological attachment to symbolic mandates. Constrained to reposition their sense of self from an agent of history to a casualty of history, thei...
Learning English
No matter how hard Rachid tries to recreate himself, to become educated and worldly—to “learn English”—it is impossible for this hip Beiruti with his cell phone and high-speed internet to sever the connection to his past in the Lebanese village of Zgharta, known for its “tough guys” and old-fashioned clan mentality. When the news of his father’s murder, a case of blood revenge, reaches him by chance through a newspaper report, it drags him inescapably back into the world of his past. Suddenly he is plunged once again into the endless questions that plagued his childhood: questions about his parents’ marriage and his own legitimacy, questions he would rather have forgotten and...
Learning English
No matter how hard Rachid tries to recreate himself, to become educated and wordly – to ‘learn English’ – it is impossible for this hip Beiruti with his cell phone and high-speed internet to sever the connection to his past in the Lebanese village of Zgharta, know for its ‘tough guys’ and old-fashioned clan mentality. When the news of his father’s murder – a case of blood revenge – reaches him by chance through a newspaper report, it drags him inescapably back into the world of his past. Suddenly he is plunged once again into the endless questions that plagued his childhood. With a suspense-filled plot and a typically idiosyncratic narrator, whose bizarre stories, comical asides and uncannily perceptive comments on human nature lead us through this tantalizing, funny, and sober book about the hold the past has on Lebanon, and on us all.
