Anima

by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Linda Gaboriau

tagged: literary

Description

This award-winning novel by playwright Wadji Mouawad is a thriller and a road novel – written in the North African storytelling tradition in which events unfold from an animal point of view.

The novel opens with a brutal murder: the protagonist arrives home to find his wife lying in a pool of blood. Driven by grief and the need to find whoever did this – “I want to see his face, I want to know who he is” – the protagonist sets out on desperate journey from Montreal to Indian reserves along the Canada–U.S. border, south through Civil War sites in the Midwest, to Animas, New Mexico. The furious odyssey awakens long-buried memories that make present circumstances even more painful.

This masterful novel is told in a bestiary of voices, more than fifty animals, birds, and insects, each with their own characterization and style of speaking, reveal the unflattering contrast between the human and the natural. Violent and dark, the novel nevertheless moves beyond the thriller genre to become a book of multiple levels, rich in symbolism and open to complex interpretation. While set in North America, Mouawad’s Lebanese roots suffuse the text, which becomes an examination of cultural influences and at the same time an excavation of childhood trauma and the legacy of war.

Anima has resonated with readers worldwide. It’s been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. It won the Thyde Monnier Grand Prize from the Société des Gens de Lettres, the Mediterranean Prize, the Literary Prize for a Second Novel in Laval, the Golden Alga Award, the Phoenix Award (as part of the Beirut Spring Festival), and the Catalan Llibreter Prize for Foreign Novel, all in 2012 and 2013. In 2015, Anima won the Lire en Poche, a prize awarded annually in France in celebration of the paperback book. An elegant translation by Linda Gaboriau brings this celebrated novel to English readers.

About the Authors

Wajdi Mouawad (author of Scorched, Tideline, Forests and Heavens, among others) has established himself as a uniquely original player on the contemporary theatre scene. His plays have been translated into more than twenty languages and presented all over the world. In all his work, from his own plays and adaptations, from the productions he has directed to the novels he wrote, Wajdi Mouawad expresses the conviction that “art bears witness to human existence through the prism of beauty.” He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours for his work. He is currently Artistic Director of Théatre de la Colline—théâtre national in Paris.

Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montréal. Her translations of plays by Québec’s most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She is the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Gaboriau has won the Governor General’s Award for Translation three times: in 1996 for Daniel Danis’s Stone and Ashes, in 2010 for Wajdi Mouawad’s Forests, and in 2019 for Wajdi Mouawad’s Birds of a Kind. She is a member of the Order of Canada and an Officer of the Ordre national du Québec.

Contributor Notes

Playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad was born in Lebanon and then lived in Quebec before settling in France. His play Incendies won critical acclaim and huge success as a film by Denis Villeneuve. In 2009, Mouawad received the Prix du Théâtre of the Académie française. His novel Anima, published in French in 2012 and translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan, won le Grand Prix Thyde Monnier de la Société des gens de lettres, le prix de la Méditerranée, le prix littéraire du deuxième roman de Lecture en tête (Laval), le prix du jury de l’Algue d’or, et le prix catalan Llibreter du roman étranger.

Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montreal. Her translations of plays by Quebec’s most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She was the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Gaboriau has twice won the Governor General’s Award for Translation: in 1996, for Daniel Danis’s Stone and Ashes, and in 2010, for Wajdi Mouawad’s Forests. She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.

Awards

Winner, Prix du deuxieme roman
Winner, Prix Méditerranée
Winner, Grand Prix Thyde Monnier

Editorial Review

Praise for the French novel:
"This enigmatic character will be seen in the course of the novel by unusual witnesses to his experience, but immediately the reader understands that Wahhch is himself a sort of stranger in the Camusian sense of the term; foreign to the world, he dissociates himself to the point that he is almost deliberately schizophrenic in order to endure the pain that afflicts him. It is precisely the agony that he drags along with him, a silent, diffuse, animal pain, imprinted from childhood, we learn later, which is felt by the least living being in contact with him, from the cat to the raven, through the earthworm, the gnat, the skunk, the vulture ... and even the reader (Lector lectoransis domesticus)."
—Le Devoir

Anima

by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Linda Gaboriau

Buy this book at: