"My name is Saad Saad, which means Hope Hope in Arabic..."Saad wants to leave the chaos of Baghdad for Europe, freedom and a future. But how do you cross borders without a dinar to call your own? How, like Ulysses, do you brave the storms, survive shipwrecks, evade the opium smugglers, turn a deaf ear to the sirens-turned-rock stars, escape the cruelty of a Cyclopean jailer, or tear yourself away from the amorous enchantment of a Sicilian Calypso?By turns violent, slapstick and tragic, Saad's one-way journey begins. From adventures to tribulations interspersed with conversations with a loving father he can't forget, the novel tells of the exodus of one of the millions of men currently in search of a place on earth: a stowaway. Always a captivating and sympathetic story-teller, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt offers this picaresque saga for our time and questions the human condition. Are borders the bulwark of our identities, or the last bastion of our illusions?
Newspaper columnist Elaine Harris has always written about her life with husband Charlie. Her editor and her legions of readers count on full disclosure from her, but what no one—least of all Charlie—anticipates, only a week after the couple decide to end their marriage, is the speed and inventiveness with which she begins to try him in the court of public opinion. On Monday morning, it’s a smirk by a forgettable former lover that first clues him in that something’s wrong. Then, before he’s settled in at his desk, another co-worker salutes Charlie with the title of Elaine’s new column: “Bastard!” A quick check online leads him to the column, the subtitle leaving little doubt as to what he’s in for: “Life with an Ex. He’s Gone but Not Forgotten.” Charlie’s only hope is that Elaine will get bored and abandon the weekly column—a colorful litany of his failures as a partner, father, breadwinner, and lover—or that it won’t catch on. But soon enough it’s a multimedia feeding frenzy, and everyone’s reading Bastard!
And for Charlie, that’s a bitch.
Comments
Post a Comment