PRESS RELEASE BANIPAL BOOKS
AN IRAQI IN PARIS
by Samuel Shimon
An autobiographical novel within a novel by
London-based Iraqi author Samuel Shimon, translated from Arabic
Samuel Shimon's first novel is a riveting tale of innocence and dreams, misery and humour, in which Arabic and Assyrian languages meet Hollywood and the films of John Ford on the streets of Paris and Iraq.
A young Iraqi leaves home to become a Hollywood film-maker, but finds
himself jailed, tortured, and thrown out of the first three countries
he gets to - Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Seeking refuge eventually, with
the Palestinians in west Beirut, he finds his way to Hollywood barred.
Later, living on the streets of Paris as s a homeless refugee and writer,
he dreams of making a film
about his father the, deaf-dumb baker who loves the young Queen of England,
and of Robert de Niro playing the role
A Paperback Original • £11.99 • 252 pp • ISBN 0-9549666-0-0 • Publication March 2005
This is the unmade movie Samuel Shimon has been planning
to make since he left his hometown in Iraq, in January 1979. Though
he can't show us yet, he sure can tell, the cunningly iconoclastic storyteller
that he is. Instead of reaching Hollywood, as he'd planned, he ends
up in Paris, living between bars, metro stations and other friends,
dreaming of writing a script about the deaf and dumb baker who was his
father and getting Robert de Niro to play the lead. He ends up writing
an enchanting text about his childhood in that wretched hometown, as
a cinema buff.
An Iraqi in Paris is somehow written against a tradition of previous autobiographical
texts by Arab writers who sojourned in Paris since the early nineteenth
century, but it surpasses most in point of veracity and candour. Samuel
Shimon is a relentless raconteur who's equipped with a keenly cinematographic
and unflinching eye for detail, a laid-back attitude toward the vicissitudes
of life on the Parisian streets, and a unique skill in making - as well
as unmaking - friends. His childhood story of misery with dim glimmers
of hope, conjures up on the screen flickering images of life on the margins
in the Middle East. If nothing else, the image of the floating Carpenter
typewriter, among others, is bound to haunt your dreams.
Anton Shammas
This Iraqi in Paris is our modern Odysseus, sharing with us his long journey and allowing us to see ourselves in his magical mirror. The book is a pure jewel.
Fadhil al-Azzawi
The Iraqi boy who leaves home afire with his dream of becoming a filmmaker in Hollywood becomes a homeless Arab intellectual in Paris. He never makes his film, but instead writes the story of his childhood. Samuel Shimon is the most enchanting of interlocutors, writing with a clarity which shifts from comedy to the tragic, but always deeply human.
Alison Croggon
Samuel Shimon gives us a push-button direct interpretation of the bitter taste of day-to-day life, washed down with incomparable humour and paradox.
Saadi Youssef
SAMUEL SHIMON was born into a poor Assyrian family in AI-Habbaniyah, Iraq, in 1956, and started work at the age of six. He had to wait until the age of nine to go to school, where he quickly rose to be top pupil. His humour and vivid imagination, his love of film and cinema made him a friend of everyone. He left Iraq in 1979 to go to Hollywood and become a film-maker, and got as far as Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia* Cairo and Tunis. He settled in Paris in 1985, and then moved permanently to London in 1996. He started writing short stories in 1979, and poetry in 1985. Parts of his autobiographical novel have been published in the Arab press to great acclaim. In Paris his small press Editions Gilgamesh published a number of volumes of poetry and short stories by Arab authors including, in 1987, a volume of his own poetry, Old Boy.
He has worked as a journalist and editor of cultural affairs on various Arab newspapers and magazines since leaving Iraq. Resettled in the UK, in 1998 he co-founded Banipal, the magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation and is its assistant editor. It now has a reputation of being the most important presenter of contemporary Arab authors to Western readers. In 2000 he co-edited a volume of poetry, A Crack in the Wall (Saqi Books), poems by sixty Arab poets from the last twenty years of the 20th century. In 2001 he helped develop and edit the first online Arab newspaper, and in Spring 2003 set up his own now hugely popular and completely independent Arabic literary site www.kikah.com, named after his deaf-dumb father.
A Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung profile of him in July 2003, when he was on a four-month writing residency in Schoppingen Artists' Village, headlined "The Initiator" described Shimon as "a tireless missionary for literary matters", adding that there was "hardly a writer in the Arab world whom Shimon has not personally met".
In November 2004 he was one of four Arab authors touring the UK on the first-ever Arab authors reading tour, Banipal Live, supported by Arts Council England. In Spring 2005 he is on a writing residency with Writing on the Wall, a cross-cultural project bringing authors to Hadrian's Wall.
For more information, or an interview with the author, please contact
Margaret Obank at Banipal Books on +44 (0) 20 8568 9747 or at editor@banipal.co.uk
