Our riches / Kaouther Adimi ; translated from the French by Chris Andrews.
Material type: TextLanguage: English Original language: French Series: New Directions paperbook ; 1466.Publisher: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2020Copyright date: ©2020Description: 148 pages ; 21 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780811222013
- 9780811228152
- 0811222012
- 0811228150
- Nos richesses. English
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Main Library | Fiction | Adimi, Kaouther | Available | 33111009635158 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the "The Joys of Duty." Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his "degenerate" work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. "I was trying to find out," Lenz says, "where the joys of duty could lead a people."
Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
"Originally published in French as Nos richesses"--Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
"Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto 'by the young, for the young', discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot's story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad's no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop's self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man's mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it's a hymn to the book and to the love of books."-- Provided by publisher.