The wedding of Zein: and other stories

✍ Scribed by Tayeb Salih; Denys Johnson-Davies; Hisham Matar

• Publisher: NYRB Classics;New York Review Books
• Year: 1969;2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 346 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1590174305

✦ Synopsis

The Wedding of Zein unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salihs tragic masterpieceSeason of Migration to the Northis set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting marriedZein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zeins particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.

In Tayeb Salihs wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zeins ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.

Salihs classic novella appears here with two of his finest short stories, The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid and A Handful of Dates.

Library : General
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9781590174302