Kite

Dominique Eddé

Translated by Ros Schwartz

 

5 x 8 inches, 320pp. June 2012

ISBN : 9780857420435

Rs  495.00 (HB)
$25.00 (HB)
£17.50 (HB)

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Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Eddé’s Kite defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late ’80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid and the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. Densely populated with myriad characters, Kite chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions and cultural clichés. The differences between East and West are central to the tension of Eddé’s book and share the responsibility for an unavoidable impasse between the lovers. This fragmented narrative—written in several voices that reflect the fragmented lives of those caught up in the madness of war—calls into question an entire way of living and thinking.

 

In lyrical, elegant, original and often startling prose, Eddé weaves together multiple strands—meditating on the nature of language, investigating the concept of the novel, and powerfully depicting the experience of being blind. Deftly evoking the intellectual scene of Beirut in the ’60s, Lebanon’s mountainscapes and the urban settings of Cairo, Paris and London, Kite probes memory with a curious mix of irony and melancholy, ending up in a place beyond hope and despair.

Born in Lebanon, Dominique Eddé is the author of several novels including Pourquoi il fait si sombre? (Why is it so Dark?, 1999) as well as an essay on Jean Genet and a book of interviews with the psychoanalyst André Green. In 1991, she curated and published the photographic project 'Beirut City Centre' featuring, in particular, the work of Robert Frank and Joseph Koudelka. She lives in Turkey.

 

Ros Schwartz has translated over 60 works of fiction and non-fiction, particularly novels by contemporary Francophone writers including Andrée Chedid, Ousmane Sembène, Yasmina Khadra and Aziz Chouaki. Her co-translation (with Amanda Hopkinson) of Dominique Manotti's lorraine Connection won the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Award in 2008. She was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009. She is Chair of English PEN's Writers in Translation Programme.

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