• Complain

Albert Cossery - The Jokers

Here you can read online Albert Cossery - The Jokers full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: New York Review of Books, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Albert Cossery The Jokers

The Jokers: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Jokers" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Who are the jokers?The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set.The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose.And the jokers are Karim, Omar, Heykal, Urfy, and their friends, free spirits who see the other jokers for the jokers they are and have cooked up a sophisticated and, most important, foolproof plan to enliven public life with a dash of subversive humor.The joke is on them all.

Albert Cossery: author's other books


Who wrote The Jokers? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Jokers — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Jokers" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
ALBERT COSSERY 19132008 was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek - photo 1
ALBERT COSSERY 19132008 was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek - photo 2

ALBERT COSSERY (19132008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life. The son of an illiterate mother and a newspaper-reading father with a private income from inherited property, Cossery was educated from a young age in French schools, where he received his baccalaurat and developed a love of classical literature. At age seventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of continuing his studies there. Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on the Port SaidNew York line. When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men God Forgot, was published in Cairo and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the United States. In 1945 he returned to Paris to write and live alongside some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Genet. He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette. In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de la francophonie de lAcadmie franaise and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la Socit des gens de lettres. His books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages, include The House of Certain Death, The Lazy Ones, and Proud Beggars.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS has translated The Engagement by Georges Simenon and The Possession by Annie Ernaux.

JAMES BUCHAN s latest novel is The Gate of Air .

The Jokers

Albert Cossery

Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis

Introduction by James Buchan

New York Review Books, New York

Picture 3

Contents

Chapters:

Introduction

Albert Cossery is a novelist all on his own. As consistent in his themes as in his sedentary habits, he published every ten years or so of a long life a novel written in French and set (with a single exception) in Egypt.

Since his death in Paris in 2008, Cosserys blend of low-life nostalgia and philosophical dandyism has won new readers in France and, in rather lesser numbers, in Egypt and Lebanon. This sparkling novel, first published as La violence et la drision by Julliard in Paris in 1964, is the sixth of his nine books to be translated into English.

Cossery was born in 1913 in Cairo into a Greek Orthodox family with some private means. Educated in the French schools of Cairo, Cossery was drawn to both surrealism and Baudelaire and, at the age of eighteen, published a book of verse, Les morsures (Bites), which I have not been able to locate.

After a cruise as a ships steward to the United States, where he seems to have met Henry Miller, he published in Cairo in 1941 a book of five surrealist stories, Les hommes oublis de Dieu, translated as Men God Forgot and praised by Miller. The book found its way to Algiers where it came to the attention of both Edmond Charlot, publisher of Albert Camus, and Camus himself. Cosserys first novel, La maison de la mort certaine (translated as The House of Certain Death), came out in Cairo in 1944. With the liberation of Paris, Cossery moved there as did Charlot, who republished both books.

At some point, Cossery married. The marriage was a failure, though whether this was a cause or an effect of Cosserys contempt for women, or both, I cannot tell. At the end of 1945, he installed himself in the hotel La Louisiane in the Latin Quarter, where he was to live (first in Room 58 and then in Room 70) for the next sixty years. Like his characters, Cossery rose late. He frequented literary cafs such as the Caf de Flore and the Deux Magots and devoted himself to affairs of gallantry. His pose of extreme indolence concealed, as with Stevenson, a heroic industry.

The House of Certain Death, in which indigent tenants await the imminent and inevitable collapse of their slum house, sets out Cosserys principal themes. Like Baudelaire, he has neither compassion nor sympathy for the poor, only a limitless curiosity. Cossery is fascinated by the division of labor in the very pit of society. His monkey men, melon sellers, sweepers, repairers of kerosene stoves, cigarette-stub pickers are echoes of Baudelaires chiffonniers (rag pickers). Cossery is entranced by very, very small sums of government money: the one-millime piece (about a quarter of a U.S. cent) that the women of the house pay for a guide to the address of the slums landlord, the two-piastre piece (a nickel) that buys a night in a hotel with only three eiderdowns for twenty guests.

Laid over the Arabic notion of 'eish (the easy life) is a sort of Cynicism, derived either from his own reading of Greek literature or by way of Camus. Like Diogenes of Sinope, the original Cynic or dog philosopher, who lived in his own filth and told Alexander the Great to get out of his light, Cosserys heroes do not seek virtue, knowledge, or salvation, but, in a world that is raving mad, only a natural and malodorous contentment. Cosserys manifesto is: The most terrible thing is not to be poor, but to be ashamed of it.

There followed, in 1948, again with Charlot, the most beautiful of all his books and his farewell to surrealism, Les fainants dans la valle fertile, translated as The Lazy Ones. Here a family of men, engulfed in an antedeluvian lethargy, or paresse sculaire, in a filthy villa in the Nile delta, continually besieged, ambushed, and overwhelmed by sleep, confront a crisis when their father considers taking a wife. There are passages of such otherworldly comedy you might be reading the first chapters of the Quixote.

Cosserys next novel was his longest and least satisfactory, Mendiants et orgueilleux (1955), translated as Proud Beggars. Here a university professor sinks into hashish and serene penury. For no reason at all, he murders a sixteen-year-old prostitute.

Having walked straight into the capital paradox of the Cynics philosophy, Cossery then withdrew from his exposed philosophical positions. Beginning with The Jokers, the characters diminish in number and become more dandified. The scene is swept a little and given a lick of paint. The insurrectionary spirit that flickers at the end of The House of Certain Death gives way to a more subtle protest.

Against bourgeois society, with its tyrannies, pitiable privileges, and futile exertions, Cossery pits flnerie, idleness, nonchalance, ridicule, and the insolence and sexual frigidity of the dandy. In The Jokers, which is set in Alexandria, the local governor has declared war on beggars and idlers. There are distant echoes of the revolutionary debates of the age, from the Situationists to Fanon, but those are submerged in comedy. Un complot de saltimbanques (1975), translated as A Splendid Conspiracy, and Une ambition dans le dsert (1984), which is set in the only Persian Gulf sheikhdom without any petroleum, are variations of this theme.

In Cosserys final novel, Les couleurs de linfamie, published in 1999 but portraying Cairo in a sort of perpetual early 1970s, the slumlord who is the moral villain of

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Jokers»

Look at similar books to The Jokers. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Jokers»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Jokers and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.