Novel
Prairies of Fever
براري الحمى
Ibrahim Nasrallah · 1985
Synopsis
Muhammad Hammad, a young teacher, goes to work at a school in al-Qunfudha, an isolated village on the Saudi coast of the Red Sea. Alone in the desert, cut off from the world, he receives only a newspaper three weeks old. Little by little alienation undoes him: past, present and future blur together, reality merges with hallucination, and one morning villagers knock at his door to ask him for money for his own funeral.
Context
The book appeared in Beirut in 1985 and was translated into English in 1993 by May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed. Hani Elayyan places it among the Arab novels of expatriation in the Gulf, the most postmodern and the least political of them: politics appears in it only by implication, through oil, exile and a newspaper announcing the invasion of South Lebanon. The Guardian counted it among ten great novels about the Arab world.
Who it is for
A short novel of rupture, with fragmented time and hallucinatory images; it requires attentive reading.
Prizes and reception
The author's first novel, it opens a wide-ranging body of work, of which six novels have appeared in English.
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