Word: ismael
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...first of Rosero’s works to be translated into English, “The Armies” was the recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize earlier this year. This short, sharp novel recounts a few days in the life of the narrator Ismael, a retired schoolteacher who lives with his wife in San José, a fictional Colombian town nestled in the highlands and surrounded by coca plantations. In the latest spate of politically-motivated violence, some citizens are murdered while others—probably including Ismael’s wife, though it’s never...
...refers to all three “sides” of the conflict that blights rural Colombia: the military, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas. In the violence that comes to engulf San José, it is impossible—and, perhaps, pointless—to distinguish between them. Ismael remembers the recent attack on the local church, “by whichever army it was, whether the paramilitaries or guerrillas.” The combatants are “slow silent figures, which emerge blurry from the last horizon of the corners...
...come to realize, however, that these prurient meditations represent more than the lecherous fantasies of an old man. Early in the novel, Ismael recalls the dire circumstances in which he and his wife first met; in the bus station of a nearby town they both witnessed the shooting of a man by an eleven year-old boy. Rushing nauseated to the lavatory, Ismael walked in on his future wife sitting on the toilet and was instantly transfixed: “… her eyes like lighthouse beams over the hitched up island, the join of her legs, the triangle...
...Hamas, for its part, was similarly dismissive of the report's findings on its rocket fire. "This report equates the victim with the aggressor," said Hamas Gaza spokseman Ismael Radwan, a statement that sums up the Israeli position, too. At the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, after all, is the question of just who is the victim...
...Timbuktu's literary output was enormous, and included works covering the history of Africa and southern Europe, religion, mathematics, medicine and law. There were manuscripts detailing the movement of the stars, possible cures for malaria and remedies for menstrual pain. "I have here my family's whole history," says Ismael Diadié Haidara, whose ancestors carried their books to Timbuktu from Toledo, Spain when they fled religious persecution in 1467, and later wrote and purchased thousands more. "Families which were exiled, which had no country, had their libraries. It was people's security. They could say, 'This is where...