Martine Woudt Libros

"Brave, rebellious and passionate ... Yazbek is no ordinary Syrian dissident." --Financial Times "The Syrian writer Samar Yazbek evokes the horror of civil war with gripping lucidity." --Le Monde Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she's crazy, but she is no fool--the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta--where, between bombings, she writes her story. In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.

This short novel conjures up the solitary daily life of Bilodo, a postman who shares his Montreal apartment with his goldfish, Bill. As a result of his indiscretion (the steaming open of personal correspondence), Bilodo becomes involved in an exchange of haiku between the woman of his dreams, a Guadeloupean beauty, and Gaston Grandpre, an eccentric intellectual whose mail Bilodo delivers. Around these events, Denis theriault weaves a passionate tragicomic love story full of twists and turns, but also rich in dazzling descriptions of lush, tropical landscapes and subtle evocations of the sober, precise art of the haiku. All this takes place against the prosaic background of a life deeply rooted in an unvarying routine.