The Puppet

Quiet solitude surrounds the oasis city of Waw, the four thick walls slowly erasing its population’s memory of living under the desert’s law. Transformed from a nomadic desert people into settled city dwellers, Waw’s citizens decide to turn their back on the rule of their ancestors and elect a leader from among the living. Aghulli, the one they choose, has to face his people’s defiance and his own moral decision on what is wrong and right. A cryptic story of conspiracy, arrogance, greed, betrayal and love,The Puppet is challenging to put down once it is opened.

With its slender spine of 120 pages, the book doesn’t even have to leave the hands of the reader until it is finished. Your evening will fly by without a trace, as theSahara sands swathe you and slowly erode your sense of time. This is exactly where author Ibrahim al-Koni wants you to be: in that mystic timeless space inhabited by the desert people, the jinn and the shadows of the spirit world. At first this may all sound familiar, like a fairy tale undulating from Scheherazade’s lips, but this is a very different fairy tale, not one night of a thousand full of adventure and capped with a happy ending. It is not even an ethnographic reproduction of Ghadames, the oasis city in the Southern Libyan Desert, where al-Koni was born in 1948. Al-Koni left his birthplace at a very young age, and in all his books he reconstructs the image of the desert from his childhood memories. Yet the infinite wasteland in the pages of The Puppet is hardly a place for child’s play. It is a space that fascinates and lures the reader into contemplation. Desert, magic, mysticism, and contemplation — it all sounds like a formula for a genuine Arabian novel, yet it is difficult to stereotype al-Koni as the typical Arab author. Born and raised a member of the Tuareg tribe — a Berber people occupying the desert lands of Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso — al-Koni didn’t learn to read and write Arabic until the age of 12. He didn’t stay in the Arab world for long, leaving as a young man for Russia, where he studied comparative literature at the Maxim Gorky Institute and read the fundamentals of Western philosophical and literary thought in Russian. After a nine-year stint in Poland as editor of a literary magazine, he settled in Switzerland, where he still resides to this day. Al-Koni still writes in formal Arabic language which does not just pull the reader smoothly along the plot of the story but also submerges him in thought. Even in English translation, this book, like his others, is not an easy read. Like an ancient traveler, al-Koni drifts through sands of the desert taking along his captivated readers. Once they embark on the voyage together, they won’t want to part. Foreseeing this unfortunate fate for al-Koni’s readers, AUC Press is also supplying three of his other books in translation: Anubis, Gold Dust, and The Seven Veils of Seth. All come highly recommended.