I sabella H ammad . The Parisian

In 1914, Midhat Kamal departs from Nablus to Cairo and boards a ship to Marseille. Fashionable and graceful, he arrives in France, the “pinnacle of Europe and the exemplar of the modern age” (25). Isabella Hammad’s debut historical novel, The Parisian, traces Midhat’s cosmopolitan life. She is at her most lyrical in excavating interiority. One day in the shower at Istanbul’s Mekteb-i Sultani high school, Midhat looks at his body and is overwhelmed with his separateness—that “electric feeling of aloneness, victorious and agonizing, unearthly” (24). He dreams of a medical degree and the recognition of his father, the textile merchant Haj Taher Kamal. Midhat is an orphan. He lost his mother at the age of two and his father to a second wife and family in Cairo shortly thereafter. Um Taher, his indefatigable grandmother, raises him. For a brief year in Montpelier, Midhat is at his happiest. He rents

Art · Economic rent · Economics · Feeling · Literature · Political science · Wife · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology