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:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
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“... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”
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“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)