Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine (* 1959 in Amman , Jordan ) is a Lebanese painter and writer who writes in the English language .

Rabih Alameddine is the son of Lebanese Druze and grew up in Kuwait , Lebanon and England . After studying at UCLA and USF , he worked as an engineer before becoming a painter and writer. He lives in San Francisco and Beirut .

Literary work

Alameddine's novels are set in the Middle East and the United States and may be popular. a. dealing with the civil war in Lebanon and emigration , with AIDS and with art (and the artistic potential that has grown out of failure). Members of Druze families are repeatedly the focus.

In his debut novel Koolaids. The Art of War tells Alameddine et al. a. by a homosexual painter who emigrated from Lebanon, an HIV-positive American and a mother who lives in embattled Beirut. The non-linear novel is made up of diary excerpts, press reports, letters, Internet entries, aphorisms , fragments of drama (in which Eleanor Roosevelt , Julio Cortázar , Jiddu Krishnamurti and Tom Cruise appear) as well as imagined conversations with other authors ( Jorge Luis Borges , Robert Coover ) etc. collaged. Koolaids was described as "a post-modernist's playground - a daring, dazzling unity of disjointed humor and horror".

His novel I, the Divine. A Novel in First Chapters consists of almost 50 first chapters - the failed attempts of the Lebanese protagonist, who emigrated to the USA, to capture her life in an autobiography or a novel. The chapters (fragments) vary not only in narrative attitude, perspective and style, but change in two cases from English to French (a transport and elite language in Lebanon).

In The Hakawati, Alameddine interweaves several in Lebanon on the 20th / 21st 19th century plot levels with a fairy tale set in the time of the Crusades . He draws on narrative patterns from the eponymous ḥakawātī (German: storytellers) and makes numerous references to other stories, including: a. from the Arabian Nights and Panchatantra collections , from the Old Testament and the Koran, and from the poems of Homer and Ovid . The Hakawati was awarded the Rome Prize for the best international book of 2009.

Alameddine's books have been translated into Arabic , Danish , French , Croatian , Dutch , Spanish , Polish and Portuguese . His novel An Unnecessary Woman , published in 2014, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and was awarded the California Book Award and the Prix Femina Étranger.

Works

• Koolaids. The Art of War (Roman), New York: Saint Martin's Press Inc, 1998 ISBN 0-312-18693-2 .
• The Perv: Stories , New York: Picador, 1999 ISBN 978-0-312-20041-1 .
• I, the Divine. A Novel in First Chapters (Roman), New York: Norton, 2001 ISBN 978-0-393-32356-6 .
• The Hakawati (novel), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008 ISBN 978-0-307-26679-8 .
• To Unnecessary Woman (Roman), New York: Grove Press, 2014 ISBN 978-0-8021-2214-8 .
  • A superfluous woman . Marion Hertle in Romanian. Munich: Louisoder, 2016 ISBN 978-3-944153-30-8 .
• The Angel of History (Roman), New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016 ISBN 978-0-8021-2576-7 .
  • The angel of history . Translation by Joachim Bartholomae . Berlin: Albino, 2018 ISBN 978-3-86300-257-2 .

Awards

• 2002 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
• 2009 Rome Prize for Best International Book of the Year for The Hakawati
• 2014 California Book Award for An Unnecessary Woman
• 2016 Prix ​​Femina Étranger for Les Vies de papier
• 2017 Lambda Literary Award for The Angel of History in the Gay Fiction category

literature

• Therí A. Pickens, “Unfitting and Not Belonging: Feeling Embodied and Being Displaced in Rabih Alameddine's Fiction”, in: New Body Politics. Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States , London: Routledge, 2014 ISBN 978-0-415-73521-6 .
• Syrine Hout, Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0-7486-4342-4 .
• Andreas Pflitsch, ““ That's why we are called Lebaneses ”: Rabih Alameddine on the unbearable ease of not being at home anywhere”, in: Asiatische Schriften , 62/4 (2008) pp. 1167–1182 ( PDF ).
• Lynne Rogers, “Hypocrisy and Homosexuality in the Middle East: Selim Nassib's Oum and Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids ”, in: The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 10/1 (2003) pp. 145-163.

See also

• Postmodern novel
• Historiographical metafiction

Web links

• Rabih Alameddines website

Individual evidence

1. ↑ German: the playground of a postmodernist - a daring, overwhelming [also: confusing] combination of humor and horror ; based on: Greg Burkman, Collage Tells Of Lebanon's Heartbreak at: community.seattletimes.nwsource.com, accessed on August 18, 2015.
2. ↑ Wail S. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural translation in Arab-American and Arab-British Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 212.
3. ↑ Lorraine Adams, Once Upon Many Times at nytimes.com, accessed August 18, 2015.
4. ↑ Lebanon: The Hakawati at: worldlitup.com, accessed on August 18, 2015 (English).
5. ↑ National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists for Publishing Year 2014 at: bookcritics.org, accessed on August 18, 2015.
6. ↑ Jonathan Lee, Interview with Rabih Alameddine, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, Fiction ( Memento of the original from August 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at: nationalbook.org, accessed on August 18, 2015. 
7. ↑ 84th Annual California Book Awards Winners at: commonwealthclub.org, accessed August 18, 2015.
8. ↑ Fellows: Rabih Alameddine at: gf.org, accessed on August 18, 2015 (English).