Tayeb Salih – författare

The story of a man undone by a culture that in part created him, Season of Migration to the North, is a powerful and evocative examination of colonization in two vastly different worlds. When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger - the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

Tayeb Salih is internationally known for his classic novel Season of Migration to the North. With humour, wit and erudite poetic insights, Salih shows another side in this affectionate memoir of his exuberant and irrepressible friend Mansi Yousif Bastawrous, sometimes known as Michael Joseph and sometimes as Ahmed Mansi Yousif. Playing Hardy to Salih’s Laurel Mansi takes centre stage among memorable 20th-century arts and political figures, including Samuel Beckett, Margot Fonteyn, Omar Sharif, Arnold Toynbee, Richard Crossman and even the Queen, but always with Salih’s poet “Master” al-Mutanabbi ready with an adroit comment.

Vem är den mystiske Mustafa Sa'id? Förvisso den mest briljante studenten i sin generation, den förste sudanes med stipendium för att studera utomlands, först i Kairo, sedan i Oxford. Men varför har han slagit sig ned i den lilla byn vid Nilens strand istället före att inta sin givna plats bland högdjuren i Khartoum? Bit för bit rullas Mustafa Sa'ids mörka hemlighet upp: Med sikte på att erövra Väst såsom hans hemland en gång erövrats av kolonisatörerna, likt en hämnare sprungen ur Mörkrets hjärta, drivs han obönhörligt mot en fruktansvärd tragedi. har skrivit efterord.