Amin Maalouf, the novel to dream of a better world
Audio 29:00
Amin Maalouf in studio at RFI (October 2020).
© RFI / Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint
By: Catherine Fruchon-Toussaint
31 min
Lebanese writer, Amin Maalouf is both the author of novels like
"Le rocher de Tanios"
(Prix Goncourt 1993) and essays, like
"Murderous Identities"
or "
The deregulation of the world"
.
Translated into some fifty languages, he has been a member of the Académie française since 2011. His new novel
"Nos frères unexpected",
published by Grasset, is a worried observation of our world, but a message of hope for our future.
(Replay)
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Cover of Amin Maalouf's new novel © Grasset
"Alec, a middle-aged cartoonist, and Eve, the best-selling novelist of a unique mythical book, are the only occupants of a tiny islet on the Atlantic coast. They do not see each other, until the day when an inexplicable breakdown of all means of communication compels them to come out of their jealous loneliness.
How is this blackout explained
?
Has the planet been the victim of a cataclysm
?
Threats of nuclear conflict and large-scale terrorism were already looming.
Could there have been a devastating slippage somewhere in the world
?
What about the nearby archipelago
?
And the country
?
What about the rest of the planet
?
Alec will gradually untie the thread of the mystery.
Thanks to his old friend Moro, who became one of the close advisers to the President of the United States, he manages to reconstruct the precise course of events.
If we have escaped disaster, he discovers, it is in a way so strange, and so unexpected, that history will never be able to resume its course of before.
The tumultuous meeting of our disoriented contemporaries with "
unexpected brothers
" who claim to be from ancient Greece, and who have been able to acquire a medical knowledge much more advanced than ours, makes the dramatic power of this novel, all in it. giving the appearance of a modern tale.
Through fiction and parable, the author treats here in a romantic way the major subjects tackled in several of his essays (Murderous identities, Le naufrage des civilizations).
"
(Presentation of the Grasset editions)
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Literature
Lebanon
France
French language
Culture
On the same subject
Culture guest
Amin Maalouf, author of "An armchair on the Seine"
In G major
1. Amin Maalouf