Ring
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: "a city whose very name sounded exotic." Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going . . . and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in "the Ring" to which the wealthy expatriate community is confined by its own xenophobia. Stifled within this community and alienated without, Quentin must decide what sort of life is worth living—safe and aloof, or engaged with the deprivation and even danger of what lies beyond the Ring.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first English translation, French-Swiss novelist Horem delivers a brief, but surprising story with a decidedly capricious narrator. When Quentin's lover abandons him for his brother and prepares to leave for America, he improvises to save face, informing her he was also moving, to the fictional city of Tahas. To play the part he applies for a job there, but when he's hired what began as a ruse takes on greater meaning. He leaves Europe for the exotic Tahas and, meeting his own deflated expectations, lives a life of whimsy, preferring to stay home watching local television programs "of which he understood not a word, but which relaxed him for that very reason." The expatriate residents of Tahas lived secluded on The Ring, a neighborhood that formed "a perfect circle on the city map," initially a government constraint that eventually became a voluntary choice of the expatriate residents. Faced with his suddenly transient life in a new land, Quentin straddles the border between the Ring and the possible dangers of straying too far from familiar territory. Horem's artful prose depicts the silent yearning of a man willing to change but often paralyzed in the face of a mesmerizing, lonely world.
