Talismano

May 15, 2011
Meddeb is a renowned scholar and essayist, an award-winning author of 21 works in multiple genres, a radio broadcaster, a former visiting professor at Yale, and currently a professor of Comparative Literature at the Universit' Paris Ouest Nanterre la D'fense. Born in Tunisia, writing in French, he is best known in English for his critiques of Islamic Fundamentalism. Talismano is an early novel, from 1976, revised a decade later. It is a work of excess, a blasphemous, sexually explicit lyric pastiche of stream-of-consciousness narration, expressionistic scene painting, and discursive ranting. On another level, it operates as an allegory about Islam. The references are diverse and opaque but will not deter the diligent reader from appreciating the riches of Meddebs descriptions, which translator Kuntz has rendered into vigorous, startling English. Akin to the equally demanding writers Antnio Lobo Antunes and Edmond Jab's, Meddeb desires to write without the word standing in for being, but rather as food for those who hunger in a broken world. This book will perplex some and nourish others.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)