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by Rashid El-Daif (Author), Nicholas R. Lobo (Translator), Alfred J. Naddaff (Translator)
What does it take to build a modern nation--and what happens when that project fails? By turns wryly absurd, unsettling, and deeply moving, Rashid El-Daif's novel Paving the Sea narrates a quest for the impossible and the disillusionment with the transformative promises of the nation. At the center of the story is Jurji Zaidan, the real-life intellectual giant of the Arab Nahda, the cultural renaissance that sought to remake the Arabic-speaking world through modern science and secular thought. Zaidan and his fictionalized friend Fares Hashem attend university where the two young idealists campaign to bring Darwin's theory of natural selection into the curriculum. When their reward is expulsion, they depart provincial Mount Lebanon and Fares sets out for the West with grand ambitions. But the pursuit of enlightenment proves far more complicated than either imagined.
Satirist, linguist, professor, and novelist, Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices on the contemporary Arabic literature scene. He has published three collections of poetry and numerous novels that have been translated into more than fourteen languages. Described as the Arab world's answer to Umberto Eco, his works represent a painful break with grand ideologies and grapple with the collapse of the initial project of Arab modernity. El-Daif teaches creative writing at the American University of Beirut.
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