The scarecrow /
The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni's Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community's leader...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English Arabic |
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Austin :
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin,
[2015]
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| Series: | Modern Middle East literatures in translation series.
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| Summary: | The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni's Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community's leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished him for opposing the use of gold in business transactions--a symptom of a critical break with their nomadic past--and now they must search for a leader who shares their fetishistic love of gold. A desert retreat inspires the group to select a leader at random, but their "choice," it appears, is not entirely human. This interloper from the spirit world proves a self-righteous despot, whose intolerance of humanity presages disaster for an oasis besieged by an international alliance. Though al-Koni has repeatedly stressed that he is not a political author, readers may see parallels not only to a former Libyan ruler but to other tyrants--past and present--who appear as hollow as a scarecrow. |
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| Physical Description: | xxi, 103 pages ; 22 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 9781477302521 (pbk.) 1477302522 (pbk.) |