Página inicialGruposDiscussãoMaisZeitgeist
Pesquise No Site
Este site usa cookies para fornecer nossos serviços, melhorar o desempenho, para análises e (se não estiver conectado) para publicidade. Ao usar o LibraryThing, você reconhece que leu e entendeu nossos Termos de Serviço e Política de Privacidade . Seu uso do site e dos serviços está sujeito a essas políticas e termos.

Resultados do Google Livros

Clique em uma foto para ir ao Google Livros

Carregando...

Passage to Dusk (1986)

de Rachid al-Daif

MembrosResenhasPopularidadeAvaliação médiaMenções
241943,491 (4.88)8
Passage to Dusk deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a postmodern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. It is excellent fiction, written in a surrealistic mode, but faithful to the characters of the people of Lebanon, their behavior during the war, and their contradictions. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape. The English-language reader has not been much exposed to Lebanese literature in translation, and Rashid al-Daif is one of Lebanon's leading writers. He has been translated into eight languages, including French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Translator Nirvana Tanoukhi manages to preserve Daif's unusual, moving, and at times humorous style in her English rendition.… (mais)
Carregando...

Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro.

Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.

» Veja também 8 menções

Rashid al-Daif’s semi-autobiographical novel Passage to Dusk is one of the most harrowing, haunting, compelling, and entertaining – yes, entertaining (I’ll get to that later) books I have ever read. By examining the physical and psychological disintegration of its unnamed narrator, who has been severely wounded in an attack, al-Daif creates a painful meditation on the impact of the Lebanese civil war on an individual, on social relations, and on the country at large.
Like Beirut itself, the narrator has been dismembered and fragmented; his wholeness has been cut into components that he desperately tries to hold together – the physical dismembering that the narrator experiences reflects the fragmentation of his inner self.

The novel begins with what appears to be an ending – the death of the unnamed narrator at the hands of a number of armed men shortly after his return to his apartment after an extended absence: “And the rest I don’t remember. I was murdered on the spot.” The reader’s expectations are quickly confounded, however, when in the next scene, the events that had previously led to the narrator’s death are replayed, with slight variations, leading only the entry of his super, Abu Ali, who had been invited to the narrator’s apartment for reasons even the narrator cannot remember. Subsequent events take on a surreal and disorienting quality, as the narrator relates stories that seem to combine snippets of Abu Ali’s one-sided conversation with his own memories and fantasies. This stream-of-consciousness narrative frustrates the reader’s attempt to understand more than the simplest outlines of what ‘actually happens’ over the course of the novel. Oppressive and horrific events are continually revisited in changed form, as though the narrator were experiencing a recurring nightmare. The events to which he returns most obsessively are the most traumatic: his disfiguring accident and his death, both of which recur in a number of variations.

From the outset, the narrator himself admits that his presentation is of questionable accuracy. Among his killers, he sees Abu Ali, who also shoots him. “But how can that be, when the super was unarmed? It’s a serious flaw in my testimony. I admit. But I did see him with my own eyes. I saw him without a gun, shooting at me. His bullets pierced me just like the other bullets. Why would I want to lie now that I’m dead?” The narrator also frequently undermines his own testimony by commenting on the fact that he is taking lots of sleeping pills or is half asleep. The narrative “eye” jumps around a lot – al-Daif employs both limited and omniscient first person narration, in addition to having the main character jump inside other character’s eyes and perceptions on occasion. There really is no authoritative perspective.

This is an experimental novel and one which gains additional layers of complexity each time it is read. The style of the narrative is essential to – rather than incidental to – the story itself. The plot is minimal and unclear – to the extent that anything can be said to have happened, how it happened is completely negotiable. Even the characters are not stable – they turn into other characters; the main character himself turns into another character and lives an entirely different life at one point. The prose itself – even in translation – is amazing and painful.

But despite this, there are rare moments of totally unexpected humor – black humor, certainly, but humor nontheless. These moments generally occur immediately after some of the most painful, searing prose I’ve ever read. For instance, in one of the scenes describing the narrator’s loss of his arm, he says: “It was humiliating, to have my blood lapped by rats. It was humiliating to have rats reach my shoulder before someone could offer me a hand, before someone could save me, move me to a hospital, a clinic, or a house….But nobody came. How I wished that some human being would come up to me before I died. But no one did. So I got up, carrying my wounds, rising above the pain….I walked on towards Barbeer [a hospital]. When I reached Barbeer, no one asked me what was wrong. It was obvious.” (Italics mine) After such a horrifying passage, I have to confess, I laughed hysterically at that last line.

This is one of my favorite books – amazing on so many levels – and I could go on and on forever. Highly recommended. ( )
1 vote fannyprice | Jan 12, 2008 |
sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha

Pertence à série publicada

Você deve entrar para editar os dados de Conhecimento Comum.
Para mais ajuda veja a página de ajuda do Conhecimento Compartilhado.
Título canônico
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Data da publicação original
Pessoas/Personagens
Lugares importantes
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Eventos importantes
Filmes relacionados
Epígrafe
Dedicatória
Primeiras palavras
Citações
Últimas palavras
Aviso de desambiguação
Editores da Publicação
Autores Resenhistas (normalmente na contracapa do livro)
Idioma original
CDD/MDS canônico
LCC Canônico

Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.

Wikipédia em inglês (1)

Passage to Dusk deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a postmodern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. It is excellent fiction, written in a surrealistic mode, but faithful to the characters of the people of Lebanon, their behavior during the war, and their contradictions. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape. The English-language reader has not been much exposed to Lebanese literature in translation, and Rashid al-Daif is one of Lebanon's leading writers. He has been translated into eight languages, including French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Translator Nirvana Tanoukhi manages to preserve Daif's unusual, moving, and at times humorous style in her English rendition.

Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas.

Descrição do livro
Resumo em haiku

Current Discussions

Nenhum(a)

Capas populares

Links rápidos

Avaliação

Média: (4.88)
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5 1
5 3

É você?

Torne-se um autor do LibraryThing.

 

Sobre | Contato | LibraryThing.com | Privacidade/Termos | Ajuda/Perguntas Frequentes | Blog | Loja | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas Históricas | Os primeiros revisores | Conhecimento Comum | 203,240,701 livros! | Barra superior: Sempre visível