Hamid Ismailov: Googling for Soul

Cover: 9781804843055 | Googling for Soul | A Novel in Short Stories | Hamid Ismailov | Buch

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Sprache: Englisch

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Beschreibung

A sculptor who left the village decades ago takes a call from a nephew he has never met, picked up by the migration police without papers. An old woman wakes before dawn with pain in both legs and reads Sufi verse instead of saying her morning prayer. A boy who is supposed to learn the rubob wants a guitar, and quietly drops a letter from his own name so it will sound Spanish. Snakes come swarming out from under the floor of the only school in the village.

Eleven stories, and by the end they are one book.

Ismailov calls Googling for Soul a novel in short stories, and the title piece shows how it works. A letter reaches the author through his friend Robert Chandler, the translator of Platonov, and it turns out to concern his own name. He tries everything to find the man who sent it: the phone directories, the search engines, friends sent into address agencies on his behalf. He never finds him. Something else comes back instead.

The people here live between the village and the metropolis, between tradition and whatever replaced it, between the language they were born into and the ones they had to learn. Some carry Uzbekistan with them. Some were carried away from it. Set side by side, their stories assemble a portrait that no one of them could hold alone.

The first story states the method out loud, borrowing from Michelangelo: sculpture is not building up, it is carving away everything that is not needed. Ismailov writes the same way, and asks the reader to hold the pieces without assembling them too early.

Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Dani Ismailov, Irina Buss-Zolotareva and Andrew Bromfield. Edited by John Farndon. Cover illustration: Caspar David Friedrich, Easter Morning (c. 1828 to 1835).

Über den Autor

Hamid Ismailov (born 1954) is an Uzbek writer, poet, journalist and translator. Born into a deeply religious Uzbek family of mullahs and khodjas, many of whom suffered during the Stalin-era persecutions, he was also shaped by an extensive Soviet education, graduating with distinction from both secondary school and military college and later earning university degrees in several disciplines. Rather than pursuing a conventional Soviet or post-Soviet career, Ismailov became a dissident writer and poet. He left Uzbekistan in 1992 and settled in the United Kingdom, where he worked for many years with the BBC World Service and later became its first Writer in Residence. Although his work has been banned in Uzbekistan, Ismailov has published numerous novels, poetry collections and other works in Uzbek, Russian and several other languages. His fiction has been widely translated, including The Railway, translated into English by Robert Chandler, as well as A Poet and Bin-Laden and Googling for Soul. Ismailov has also translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and other languages. Critics have compared his award-winning writing to Russian classical literature, Sufi parables and Western postmodernism, while his distinctive voice draws on an unusually rich intercultural experience spanning Central Asia, Russia and the West.

Erscheinungsjahr:	2026
Genre:	Importe , Romane & Erzählungen
Rubrik:	Belletristik
Medium:	Taschenbuch
ISBN-13:	9781804843055
ISBN-10:	1804843059
Sprache:	Englisch
Einband:	Kartoniert / Broschiert
Autor:	Ismailov, Hamid
Redaktion:	Farndon, John
Hersteller:	GLAGOSLAV PUBLICATIONS B.V.
Verantwortliche Person für die EU:	Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, D-36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr@libri.de
Maße:	203 x 127 x 17 mm
Von/Mit:	Hamid Ismailov
Erscheinungsdatum:	25.09.2026
Gewicht:	0,326 kg