As a writer who is an active part of the EU-Read&Art project, aimed at promoting shared reading and videomaking, I myself tried my hand at making the booktrailer of my second work, the novel “Antar” (Vertigo Edizioni, 2018).
After presenting the book to the learners, on the occasion of an open-air meeting in which, among other things, topical issues relating to European refugees (a topic relevant in this novel), I proceeded to create the related book trailer.
The protagonist of the story is Antar, a young Italian-Syrian whose personality vacillates between cultures that attract and repel him according to the often dramatic events that mark his path.
He bears the name of a famous poet-warrior of the pre-Islamic era, ʿAntara Ibn Shaddād, a sort of Ulysses of the Arab world with whose destiny he identifies in a specular way.
Syrian in Italy and Italian in Syria, he experiences a perennial short-circuit of identity, which translates into a real “return journey”, a descent into hell in a now dismembered Syria, into whose fragments his own family history breaks down, intertwining with that of strong characters such as Father Paolo Dall’Oglio.
A story that draws on the complexity of this historical moment, where the narrator becomes the lens through which the image of the Syrian disaster is amplified and the suspended dimension of who is an unconscious bridge between cultures.
A great pleasure for me to know that a novel that I care a lot about, part of my life experience in Syria, is now part of the first Booktrailers Digital European Library.
Author: Eliana Iorfida, writer
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