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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > The Silence and the Roar

The Silence and the Roar

With The Silence and the Roar, Nihad Sirees writes a powerful, life-affirming and Kafkaesque novel about a censored writer trying to live a normal life under a Middle Eastern dictatorship, Syria.

Fathi, a writer no longer permitted to write, makes his way through a city churned by parades for an unnamed dictator. It is a day stifled by heat and the noise of the chants, a day of people trampled, and of the brutality and bullying of the party faithful. But Fathi presses treacherously against the crowd, attempting just to visit his mother and his girlfriend.

The Silence and the Roar is a personal, urgent, funny and aggrieved novel. It asks what it means to have a conscience, or to laugh, or to endure in a time of the violence, strangeness and roar of tyranny. It is both a true literary achievement and an act of real courage by a brilliant Syrian writer.

‘Sirees’s vision of tyranny, superlatively translated, is distinctive enough to be ranked with Orwell, Huxley or Marquez’s.’
Independent

Author

Nihad Sirees

Nihad Sirees

Books

The Silence and the Roar

States of Passion

Nihad Sirees is a civil engineer who was born in Aleppo. His novels include   Cancer, The North Winds, A Case of Passion,   and The Silence and the Roar.   Of his many television dramas the most widely acclaimed,   Silk Market,   set in Aleppo during the political turmoil of the 1950s, was shown throughout the Middle East, in Germany and in Australia. His latest series,   Al Khait Al Abiadh   (The First Gleam of Dawn), provides a frank depiction of the country’s government-controlled media.   After increasing surveillance and pressure from the Syrian government, Nihad Sirees left Syria in 2012. He was at   Brown University in the US on an International Writers Fellowship from 2012 – 2013.

Translator

Max Weiss

Max Weiss

Books

A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution

The Silence and the Roar

States of Passion

Max Weiss is an American scholar and translator, specialising in the culture and history of the   Middle East.   He studied biology and   history at   University of California, Berkeley   before moving on to   Stanford University, where he completed his PhD in modern Middle Eastern history in 2007.

Weiss is the author of   In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism and the Making of Modern Lebanon   (2010). He is also a noted translator of contemporary   Arabic   literature   into English. His translation of Abbas Beydoun’s novel   Blood Test   won the   Arkansas Arabic Translation Award.   He joined the faculty of   Princeton University   in 2010.

Published by

Pushkin Press, 2013
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With The Silence and the Roar, Nihad Sirees writes a powerful, life-affirming and Kafkaesque novel about a censored writer trying to live a normal life under a Middle Eastern dictatorship, Syria.

Fathi, a writer no longer permitted to write, makes his way through a city churned by parades for an unnamed dictator. It is a day stifled by heat and the noise of the chants, a day of people trampled, and of the brutality and bullying of the party faithful. But Fathi presses treacherously against the crowd, attempting just to visit his mother and his girlfriend.

The Silence and the Roar is a personal, urgent, funny and aggrieved novel. It asks what it means to have a conscience, or to laugh, or to endure in a time of the violence, strangeness and roar of tyranny. It is both a true literary achievement and an act of real courage by a brilliant Syrian writer.

‘Sirees’s vision of tyranny, superlatively translated, is distinctive enough to be ranked with Orwell, Huxley or Marquez’s.’
Independent

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