《When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad》Yahia, Mona电子书txt下载、在线阅读、内容简介、评论读后感-当当读书

When the Grey Beetles Took…

Yahia, Mona

内容简介

In Baghdad , Lina is trying to lead a normal life, but politics keep intruding. Violent government coups are almost annual events and its difficult for a child to understand whats going on or who to believe. The need for secrecy means Lina cannot tell her best friend that they are just waiting for the right moment to flee. It is the 1960s and Lina is part of the dwindling Jewish community Mona Yahia was born in Baghdad in 1954 and escaped with her family to Israel in 1970. In 1985 she moved to Germany to study fine arts and has remained there ever since. Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for Fiction 2001 Yahia rolls Baghdad around her tongue, savouring its suks, smells, and sweetmeats (reading her makes one hungry). This is a truly exotic novel, but its also a coming-of-age work in which the almost imperceptible transformation from childhood to adolescence is saltily observed and never sentimentalised. Yahias prose courses with insight and wit. Her deftness of touch means that, despite its subject-matter, this novel never becomes a bleak tale of religious persecution, but remains a fresh story about adolescent experience in adversity with parallels in the most unlikely places. Anne Karpf, The Guardian The novel powerfully conveys the authors outrage, as well as her nostalgia for her native land. The Times Yahias writing evokes both the sensuality of domestic intimacyalongside the horror of public hangingsWhen the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad is most politically sophisticated, and also most poignant, when it explores questions of language and identity. Alev Adil, Times Literary Supplement

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