Divorce Islamic Style

by Amara Lakhous, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

Overview

Secret identities, criminal conspiracies, and forbidden love converge in this “whimsical and at times heartbreaking look” at the Muslim communities of Rome (The New York Times).

The Italian secret service believes that a group of Muslim immigrants is planning a terrorist attack. Christian Mazzari, a young Sicilian translator who speaks perfect Arabic, goes undercover in Rome’s Egyptian neighborhood, Viale Marconi, to infiltrate the group. Posing as a recently arrived Tunisian in search of a job and a place to sleep, Christian soon meets Sofia, a young Egyptian immigrant whose arranged marriage is anything but fulfilling. While Christian attempts in vain to uncover terrorist activity, Sofia is on another kind of secret mission—in defiance of a husband who forbids her to work.
In alternating voices, Algerian-born Italian author Amara Lakhous examines the commonplaces and stereotypes of life in modern, multicultural Italy. Divorce Islamic Style mixes the rational and the absurd as it depicts the conflicts and contradictions of today's globalized world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609450663
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/27/2012
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Amara Lakhous was born in Algiers in 1970. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers and another in cultural anthropology from the University la Sapienza, Rome. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (Europa Editions, 2008) was awarded Italy's prestigious Flaiano prize and was described by the Seattle Times as a "wonderfully offbeat novel." Lakhous lives in Italy.

Ann Goldstein is an editor and head of the copy department at The New Yorker.  Her translations for Europa Editions include novels by Elena Ferrante, Alessandro Piperno, Romano Bilenchi, and Giancarlo de Cataldo.

Editorial Reviews

Lakhous (Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio) deftly satirizes political, cultural, and religious corruption in this clever comedy of errors. Sicilian narrator Christian Mazzari, code name Issa “the Tunisian,” is an excitable “Arabist” student recruited by SISMI, Italian military intelligence in 2005, to infiltrate the Arab Muslim community in Rome and learn about “Operation Little Cairo” (Little Cairo being an “international calling center”). Issa shares narration duties with feisty Egyptian housewife Sophia, a call center patron chronicling her marriage to and multiple divorces from Said, who is called Felice (happy), the Islamic fundamentalist whom she derisively calls “the architect” (he has a degree in architecture but works in a restaurant). Secretly working as a hairdresser to save money for her sister Zeineb’s reconstructive surgery after a botched female circumcision, Sophia walks a minefield between cultures: Islamic, Arab, Egyptian, Italian, and, eventually—as she comes into contact with the handsome Issa—that of “Tunisian” intelligence. Though a quick conclusion leaves a thread or two still untied, the novel still exposes what role personal corruption has played all along in Little Cairo’s political, cultural, and religious intrigue. Issa, who cleaves to aphorisms, knows that “he wolf with a bad conscience thinks the worst of everyone,” and it’s a worthwhile satire that reveals how that wolf is made. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Divorce Islamic Style

"The author's real subject is the heave and crush of modern, polyglot Rome, and he renders the jabs of everyday speech with such precision that the novel feels exclaimed rather than written."
—The New Yorker

"A satirical, enigmatic take on the racial tensions that afflict present-day Europe."
—Brooklyn Rail

"What's memorable about Lakhous' novel is what he shows us of an often inward-looking nation confronting the teeming vibrancy of multicultural life."
—NPR's Fresh Air

"Do we have an Italian Camus on our hands? Just possibly...No recent Italian novel so elegantly and directly confronts the 'new Italy.'"
—Philadelphia Inquirer

Praise for   Amara Lakhous

"French and British literatures have long been enriched by the biculturalism of authors like Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amin Maalouf, Gaitam Malkani, and Monica Ali. With talented new writers like Lakhous, Italy is closing the gap."
—The New York Times

"As a novelist of culture clash, Lakhous has the faculty to maintain colorful voices with the luxury of introducing political themes as instantiations of character."
—Bookforum
 

From the Publisher

"Do we have an Italian Camus on our hands? Just possibly . . . No recent Italian novel so elegantly and directly confronts the 'new Italy.'"

Philadelphia Inquirer

"What's memorable about Lakhous' novel is what he shows us of an often inward-looking nation confronting the teeming vibrancy of multicultural life."

NPR's Fresh Air

"A satirical, enigmatic take on the racial tensions that afflict present-day Europe."

Brooklyn Rail

"The author's real subject is the heave and crush of modern, polyglot Rome, and he renders the jabs of everyday speech with such precision that the novel feels exclaimed rather than written."

The New Yorker

…a delightful way to set the record straight, a whimsical and at times heartbreaking look at the Muslim immigrants who work in pizza kitchens and live in communal apartments near Viale Marconi, a crowded, commercial part of Rome that tourists rarely see. It's hard to find the lighter side of Islamic terrorism or the subjugation of women, but as the title suggests, Divorce Islamic Style does it by scaling those themes down to the size of two ordinary people, Issa and Sofia, who cross paths in ways that can verge on the farcical. They tell their tales in alternating first-person narratives, so the story unfolds like a duet—one in which the singers are in different sound booths and don't know when and where their voices overlap.
—The New York Times Book Review

Alessandra Stanley