Fiction
Ziedan has also written fiction. His novel Zil al-Af’a ("Shadow of the Serpent") treats the notion of the sacred female through a contemporary setting with humdrum personae in the first part; in the second part, letter fragments from a female anthropologist to her daughter, the heroine of the first part, explain how the role of the female has been misshapen, abused and diabolically transformed throughout history. The novel has been criticized for its abnormal structure and superfluous intellectualism.
Ziedan's second novel is the historico-theological work Azazel, which won the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the so-called "Arabic Booker"). According to the book, it is written as a translation of scrolls that had been discovered in the ruins of a monastery northwest of Aleppo, in Syria. An Egyptian monk called “Hypa” wrote the original manuscript as an autobiography in the Aramaic language in first half of the fifth century AD. This was a time of great internal turmoil in Eastern Christianity.
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Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)