Description
Who are those “light-spirited souls”—those who “arrive in a flash and vanish just as quickly”—to whom the author dedicates this diary? With elegant language and the sensibility of a poet who views poetry as the creator of language—and with the generous mindset of one open to difference as a means of self-enrichment—the author engages in a “game of mirrors,” seeking his own profound self within the “Other.” In the preface to this diary—winner of the Ibn Battuta Prize for Contemporary Travel Writing—Makhlouf writes: “Through this book, I revisit, in particular, the first two decades of my life in Paris during the late twentieth century. It was a time when the city glowed with a thousand colors—culturally and creatively—and when diverse currents of literature and art flowed into its vast expanse from every corner of the globe, including the Arab world. This was before the voice of thought began to fade worldwide, before critical sensibility waned, and before literature and art began to falter under the blows of triumphant capital—a force that obliterates anything that cannot be commodified or transformed into an instrument of material gain.”
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