Who are those “light-spirited souls”\u2014those who “arrive in a flash and vanish just as quickly”\u2014to whom the author dedicates this diary? With elegant language and the sensibility of a poet who views poetry as the creator of language\u2014and with the generous mindset of one open to difference as a means of self-enrichment\u2014the author engages in a “game of mirrors,” seeking his own profound self within the “Other.” In the preface to this diary\u2014winner of the Ibn Battuta Prize for Contemporary Travel Writing\u2014Makhlouf 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\u2014culturally and creatively\u2014and 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\u2014a force that obliterates anything that cannot be commodified or transformed into an instrument of material gain.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The book recaptures memories of life in Paris, tracing the city\u2019s cultural and intellectual transformations and the literary, artistic, and human experiences it witnessed. It blends diary entries with personal reflections on place, memory, and the nature of human connection with the “Other.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":32688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[901,899,881,854],"product_tag":[1148,2728,1359,1343],"class_list":["post-32690","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-travel-literature","product_cat-prose-literature","product_cat-tourism-and-trips","product_cat-biography-and-memoirs","product_tag-culture","product_tag-literature","product_tag-philosophy","product_tag-thought","pa_book-author-issa-makhlouf","first","onbackorder","sale","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/32690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=32690"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/awraqonline.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=32690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}