Hédi Kaddour – författare

Hédi Kaddour’s poetry arises from observation, from situations both ordinary and emblematic—of contemporary life, of human stubbornness, human invention, or human cruelty. With Treason, the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents an English-speaking audience with the first selected volume of his work. The poetries of several languages and literary traditions are lively and constant presences in the work of Hédi Kaddour, a Parisian as well as a Germanist and an Arabist.  A walker’s, a watcher’s, and a listener’s poems, his sonnet-shaped vignettes often include a line or two of dialogue that turns his observations and each poem itself into a kind of miniature theater piece.  Favoring compact, classical models over long verse forms, Kaddour questions the structures of syntax and the limits of poetic form, combining elements of both international modernism and postmodernism with great sophistication. Capturing Kaddour’s full range of diction, as well as his speed, momentum, and tone, Marilyn Hacker’s translations brilliantly bring these poems alive.

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London, and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, find themselves in Hedi Kaddour's Little Grey Lies. Once lovers, but now friends, Max and Lena travel with Lena's new man, Thibault, and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing. An aging war hero, Strether seems to Max to be his best chance at a story, but as the two men talk, it seems Stether may not be who he says he is and the old soldier's past begins to trouble Max and Lena as they crash forward through memories and truths not theirs. As in his other work, internationally renowned poet and novelist Hedi Kaddour offers shifting time-frames and kaleidoscopic viewpoints in a mannered metafictional thriller that bears comparison to both Robert Coover and John Le Carre.Little Grey Lies is historical suspense at its best.