The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout #pebbleinwaterswrites #books #bookreview #tbrchallenge #bookchatter @blogchatter

The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout won the prestigious Arab Booker Prize for an outstanding piece of literature produced in 2015 by the 59-year-old professor of Arabic, Literature, and Discourse Analysis at Manouba University. He is known for a number of fine works of literary criticism. The book was banned by UAE for reasons that were never disclosed officially. As a reader of this phenomenal book, it becomes apparently easier to guess the ressons of it getting banned. The book became a big threat for many sitting at very high places in the society as the book unfolds reasons of discomfort and uneasiness one experiences while living in a society that is not free. The main character of the story, Abdel Nasser is a leftist activist in his college and is very passionate about his cause. He is action packed, smart, and handsome with a fire in his belly.

“The novel, for me, is a way of looking into the chaos of society even if at first glance it appears stable and coherent. The chaos described in the book is not my chaos. It is a chaos of a society in transition from one regime to another.”, says Shukri Mabkhout, the author of The Italian. The story is presented in a very unique style through a narrator who is studying in the same college along with Abdel Nasser. The narrator claims to be a close friend of Abdel though his claim gets contradicted in many parts of the story. The personality traits of the narrator and Abdel are totally opposite and the narrator always craved to become like Abdel. But he knew that, that was almost impossible. Then our narrator brings another interesting character in the story, Zeina, who is quite an intelligent yet mysterious woman. 
Our protagonist Abdel falls in love with Zeina at very first sight. Abdel is firm about his love for Zeina and desires to spend his whole life with Zeina. Zeina on the other hand is not too sure if she is capable of making love. The story of The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout is quite impressively penned in a very unique style.
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