Prairies of Fever

By Ibrahim Nasrallah

1985

First Published

3.23

Average Rating

163

Number of Pages

4H58M

Audio Length

Prairies of Fever is one of the foremost modernist novels of our time. A negation of chronology and sequence, a cohesve relationship between form and content, and a temporal parallelism of events, memories and dreams, give the novel a unique tenor. The central character, Muhammad Hammad, is a young teacher hired, like hundreds of others from all over the Arab world, to teach in a remote part of the Arabian peninsula. The novel recounts his harrowing struggle to retain any sense of identity at all in the bleak and alienating place he finds himself in, caught between the infinite expanse of desert and the intolerable narrowness of village life. His psychic and physical anguish, beset as he is by hallucinations, fantasies and the indifference of the villagers, is mirrored in the writing of the novel: time appears unfixed as the story jumps from past to future and back to the present; there is an eerie fusion of the animal and human worlds; and reality and fantasy become hard to distinguish. The result is an exceptional poetic novel, disturbing, evocative and deeply moving.

Avg Rating

3.23

Number of Ratings

640

5 STARS

18%

4 STARS

21%

3 STARS

36%

2 STARS

17%

1 STARS

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Author

Ibrahim Nasrallah

Author · 41 books

Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian poet, novelist, professor, painter and photographer. He was born in the Wihdat Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. He studied in UNRWA schools in the camp and got his teaching degree from a training college in the camp. He taught in Saudi Arabia for 2 years and worked as a journalist between 1978 and 1996. Nasrallah then returned to Jordan and worked at Dostur, Afaq and Hasad newspapers. He is in charge of cultural activities at Darat-al-Funun in Amman. He has published 14 books of poetry, 13 novels and two children's books. . In 2009 his novel "The Time of White Horses" was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for Arabic Fiction. Nasrallah is a member of the Sakakini General Assembly. In 2006, Ibrahim Nasrallah decided to dedicate himself fully to his writing profession.