The Arch and the Butterfly

Youssef al-Firsiwi, a left-wing Moroccan intellectual who once served time in prison for his politics and now writes a column for a party paper, has settled into compromise: a fragile balance with his family, his friends and even the regime. Then, on an ordinary day, an anonymous letter informs him that his son Yassin, raised in a secular, free-thinking home and sent to Paris to study architecture, has died a martyr in Afghanistan. The blow shakes all his certainties; he even loses his sense of smell. Through Youssef the novel follows three generations of the Firsiwi family, from his father, who came back from Germany with a German wife and, blinded in an accident, now guides tourists around the ruins of Volubilis, to a generation of Arab leftists whose dreams ended in disappointment in a Morocco reshaped by money and speculation.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

335 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Morocco

First published

2010 by Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9789953684222 (original)

9789992179055 (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, Qatar)

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Wikidata