Date de naissance: 1950
Sexe: male
Nationalité: Lebanon
Lieux de résidence: Noumairieh, Lebanon
Beirut, Lebanon
Professions: journalist
Courte biographie: Hassan Daoud was born Hassan Zebib in 1950 in Beirut to Shiites from South Lebanon. His family lived summers in Noumairieh and the remainder of the year in Beirut. He studied Arabic literature and served as a journalist in Beirut during the civil war. He is currently chief editor of Nawafez (Windows), the cultural supplement for Al Mustaqbal Daily in Beirut. He writes extensively on cultural and political matters for a number of Lebanese and Arab newspapers. Although he has published several novels and collections of short stories, very little of his work has been translated in complete form into English. The English translation of his most recent work, The Year of the Revolutionary Bread-Making Machine will be published in the fall of 2007.

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The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-making Machine par Hassan Daoud

Snapshots of life in Beirut in the 60's.

Although I don't usually have a problem with books in translation, I felt this one lost out on 2 fronts. Firstly the translation itself was very clunky, I found I was re-reading paragraphs because it was not clear who 'he' was, or who had done what. This slowed down my reading and became quite aggravating. Secondly, I read this for a book group and one member had read the Arabic version. She thoroughly enjoyed the book and from her comments I felt the translation had lost out on a lot of the nuance and feeling of the original.

OK, so, having aired my grievances, I did still feel that the book had something to offer in terms of providing a series of snapshots of life in 1960's Beirut, particularly pertaining to the intense work situation in a bakery of the time. These bakeries are now a thing of the past, as are so many labour intensive operations; by the end of the book, new mechanisation had come into use and most of the staff were out of work. Daoud certainly gave an excellent feel for the hard and heavy work involved in making bread and how the bakery was an integral part of the community.
Alongside this we followed the coming-of-age of a group of teenagers, narrated by the son af the bakery owner. In a strange way, we came to know more of the characters of his friends that of the narrator himself, and I felt the same way about several characters who remained un-named - 'my brother' and 'my aunt's husband'. On the other hand, some charcters were well drawn, Khalil and Ramesh in particular.

This reads as a collection of brief short stories, and at only 160 pages it is not a demanding read.
I'd recommend it for anyone who is interested in global literature and in learning of people and places that we would not normally have access to.… (plus d'informations)

Signalé

DubaiReader | May 3, 2011 |

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