Status
Available
Publication
City Lights Books (1982), Edition: 4th Printing
Description
The Oblivion Seekers is a selection of Isabelle Eberhardt's best stories and vignettes of African life.
User reviews
LibraryThing member JimmyChanga
The back of my copy of the book said "One of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world" -- Cecily Mackworth.
Maybe at the time it was. But it seems to me more like one of the strangest women who has ever given any documents to the world.
Here she is dressed in her typical
She was a nomad, and pretty much wandered throughout her life, writing short journalistic/story pieces--mostly about the wandering lifestyle. The one novel she wrote was destroyed in a 1904 flash flood that also took her life at the age of 27.
The stories in this slim book are stories of people who struggle with freedom and convention. They also contain incredibly vivid descriptions of landscapes. She seems to have a strong sense of justice. In the story "Criminal", she says "Crime, particularly among the poor and down-trodden, is often a last gesture of freedom". She is a genuine independent thinker; though her stories aren't driven by thought, you get a sense of her originality through them.
Above the gorges, scarcely moving their wings, hung the eagles, like golden nails affixed to the incandescent sky. He came to the true countryside... It was the month of July. Not even a strip of green remained on the land's exasperated palette. The pines, the pistachio trees and the palmettos were like blackish rust against the red earth. The dried-up river beds with their banks that seemed to have been drawn with sanguine made long gaping wounds in the landscape, revealing the gray bones of rock inside, among the slowly dying oleanders. The harvested fields gave a lion-colored tint to the hillsides. Little by little the colorless sky was killing everything.
Maybe at the time it was. But it seems to me more like one of the strangest women who has ever given any documents to the world.
Here she is dressed in her typical
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moslem man attire (she dressed up as a man all her life). She was born in Switzerland, raised by a Russian nihilist father, and lived most of her life in Algeria and South Africa and occasionally France. Apparently the French government thought she was a spy, and went to great lengths to keep her out of their country, even though she was legally married to a frenchman.She was a nomad, and pretty much wandered throughout her life, writing short journalistic/story pieces--mostly about the wandering lifestyle. The one novel she wrote was destroyed in a 1904 flash flood that also took her life at the age of 27.
The stories in this slim book are stories of people who struggle with freedom and convention. They also contain incredibly vivid descriptions of landscapes. She seems to have a strong sense of justice. In the story "Criminal", she says "Crime, particularly among the poor and down-trodden, is often a last gesture of freedom". She is a genuine independent thinker; though her stories aren't driven by thought, you get a sense of her originality through them.
Above the gorges, scarcely moving their wings, hung the eagles, like golden nails affixed to the incandescent sky. He came to the true countryside... It was the month of July. Not even a strip of green remained on the land's exasperated palette. The pines, the pistachio trees and the palmettos were like blackish rust against the red earth. The dried-up river beds with their banks that seemed to have been drawn with sanguine made long gaping wounds in the landscape, revealing the gray bones of rock inside, among the slowly dying oleanders. The harvested fields gave a lion-colored tint to the hillsides. Little by little the colorless sky was killing everything.
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LibraryThing member mbmackay
I love quirky, and the back-story of this author is about as quirky as you could get.
The author is a young Swiss, born in 1877. She grew up in an unconventional family environment (her father was an ex-Orthodox priest turned atheist), was home schooled and took to wearing boys clothes as a matter
Her writing is vivid and tells of life in an exotic and lost world. She was largely spurned by the French colonists, but lived an extraordinary life for the times.
Amazing.
The author is a young Swiss, born in 1877. She grew up in an unconventional family environment (her father was an ex-Orthodox priest turned atheist), was home schooled and took to wearing boys clothes as a matter
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of course. She travelled widely in colonial Algeria, often, apparently, gaining access to some places and events by her old habit of cross-dressing. She died so very prematurely, in a flood at 27.Her writing is vivid and tells of life in an exotic and lost world. She was largely spurned by the French colonists, but lived an extraordinary life for the times.
Amazing.
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