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.
Read more about this topic: Youssef Ziedan
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“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)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“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)