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THE
TILLER OF WATERS
Hoda Barakat
Rs 375 Hb 2012
81-88965-69-3
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This spellbinding novel
narrates the many-layered recollections of a
hallucinating man in devastated Beirut, 1989.
The desolate, almost surreal, urban landscape
is enriched by the unfolding of the family sagas
of Niqula Mitri and his beloved Shamsa, the Kurdish maid.
Barakat weaves into her sophisticated narrative shreds
of scientific discourse about herbal plants and textile crafts,
customs and manners of Arabs, Armenians and Kurds, mythological
figures from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Arabia,
the theosophy of the African Dogons and the medieval Byzantines,
and historical accounts of the Crusades in the Holy Land
and the silk route to China.
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HODA
BARAKAT
has worked in higher
education, journalism and research. She was forced to leave
Lebanon during the Civil War of 1989, and has lived in
exile in France since then.The Tiller
of Waters won the Naghib
Mahfouz award for Literature in 2000. She has
also published a collection of short stories and
two other novels, one of which, The Stones of Laughter,
was published in an English translation in 1994.
She has been shortlisted for the
Man Booker International Prize, 2015.
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| A powerful story of
humanity, of what should be, or should have been, protected.
Barakat … weaves and intertwines, page after page, reality with
history, past and present.
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—al-Jadid
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