Search results for ""Author Charis Olszok""

Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhl?q?t) in which they are framed. As Libya transforms into a dictatorial, rentier state, animals represent multi-layered allegories for human suffering, while also becoming focal points for empathy and ethics in their own right. Within reflections on Italian colonisation and ensuing forms of political and social oppression, concomitant with oil, urbanisation, exile and war, staged in remote deserts, isolated coastlines and neglected city parks, The Libyan Novel examines how physical, emotional and intellectual hardship prompts empathetic gazes across species lines. Through engagement with the folkloric and Sufi traditions which define the country's past, and shape its modern fiction, it further traces the spiritually, environmentally and politically holistic imaginings that contest a precarious reality.

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In Goat Mountain, Habib Selmi’s first novel, published in Arabic in 1988, a young man’s journey begins in a dilapidated old bus that takes four hours to reach Al-‘Ala, from where he takes a long ride on mule back, accompanied by a mysterious older man who is to play an important part in the young man’s new life. They finally arrive at Goat Mountain, a forlorn, Tunisian desert village. The school is a single room. The youth passes the first night in the house of his uncommunicative guide, whose name is Ismail . . . He grows more uneasy and depressed as Ismail becomes ever more powerful until, with a new truck and his own private army, Ismail dominates village life and casts a menacing shadow over the young man.

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