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AUTHORS FOR A NEW AGE

Aug 042016
 
Gaza Series by Zoriah.

Gaza Series by Zoriah.

=By= Gaither Stewart

A response to Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury.

On this hot Italian late afternoon, after over a week inside the literary work entitled Gate of the Sun, I am still wandering in the gossamer framework of the novel constructed by a great writer and storyteller, Elias Khoury, a 531-page “story” consisting of the stories, incidents, histories, lives and deaths narrated by the author’s canvas of countless characters. I am still not certain if I have read a hymn to the courage of the Palestinian people, its men and women, or a dirge to their ceaseless suffering and death. Or, perhaps, the Lebanese author and activist in the Palestinian liberation movement intended his stupendous work of art as both. In any case, I have not even attempted to write here a review of this complex, poetic masterpiece, originally published as Bab al-Shams by Dar-al-Adab, Beirut, 1998 , first published in the USA by Archipelago Books, and finally the edition I read by Picador, 2005, in the translation by Humphrey Davies which seems to me, a non-Arabic reader, magnificent. For me, this novel is emblematic of the glory of fiction. I would challenge anyone to accomplish in non-fiction what Elias Khoury has done here.

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Jun 132016
 

Amulet cover

=By= Gaither Stewart

AMULET  A Political-Fantasy Novel by Roberto Bolaño
As read and admired by political novelist Gaither Stewart

I am reading for the first time the work of Chilean born writer, Roberto Bolaño. His novel, Amulet, set in a phantasmagoric Mexico City that, perhaps, also because it is Latin America’s biggest city, represents the entire crushed and tortured and imprisoned and murdered Latin America while also his characters are emblematic of the suffering and decimation of much of the best of the Latin American youth. Perhaps the author chose to highlight Mexico City, not only because of the massacre of Mexican students there in 1968, but also because he moved there as a teenager and lived there many years before moving to Spain and Barcelona where he died at 50.

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