Novel
Elissa, la reine vagabonde
Not translated into English
Fawzi Mellah · 1988
Synopsis
Driven from power in Tyre after the assassination of her husband, a high priest, the Phoenician queen Elissa takes to the sea with ten ships to seek a new land. From Cyprus to Sabratha, on the Libyan coast, where she finds a people without government, generous and peaceful, then to Hadrumetum, she reaches the shore where Qart Hadasht is to be born. She entrusts her wandering to tablets addressed to her brother Pygmalion, which the narrator, faithful to a promise made to his grandfather, strives to decipher and put back in order.
Context
The novel appeared from Éditions du Seuil in 1988, in one hundred and ninety pages, a year after the author's first narrative from the same publisher, and was reissued in 1990 in a smaller format. It replaces the Greco-Roman Dido, Virgil's, with the Punic figure of Elissa, and mixes epic, historical novel, letters, memoirs and essay, making the queen by turns a myth and a woman brought back to her own measure. The Store norske leksikon reads in it, through the queen taking refuge at sea, a critique of the society and politics of the author's time. Hans Thill translated it into German, published by Eichborn in Frankfurt in 1989.
Who it is for
A short novel about the legendary founder of Carthage, accessible without prior knowledge of Phoenician antiquity.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in 1990, translated into German as early as 1989, and studied since then in university dissertations in Algeria.
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