Edwin Nasr on the literary inspirations for Fear Eats Ali—a work of “hysterical fiction,” as he puts it in an interview with co-publisher Wirklichkeit Books, written from 2023 to 2026 in Berlin. —WS
I returned to Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose again and again because it so brilliantly understands that, in moments of world-historical rupture, there are psychic and moral convulsions that emerge which require tending to, lest we prefer to allow vengeful ghosts to haunt us to our graves. Adnan’s novel is brief and compressed to the point of suffocation, and yet it contains an entire world of impossible choices—it leaves you nauseous and enraged. Sitt Marie Rose taught me that a novel might remain clear-headed in speaking through a certain historical position, a set of immutable ethical and political imperatives, all the while holding onto contradiction and ambiguity.
Sitt Marie Rose
Etel Adnan
Translated from the French by Georgina Kleege
Post-Apollo Press, 1982
Another book that accompanied me through the writing process was Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis, or, The Treatise of Vain Struggle because of the way it deals with the confessional as a kind of concealment, rather than an exploration of inner truth. Her protagonist is constantly wavering between crude honesty and unmistakable self-deception. It’s unnerving and at times unbearable, and that tension was crucial for thinking about Ali.
Alexis, or the Treatise on the Vain Struggle
Marguerite Yourcenar
Translated from the French by Walter Kaiser
Farrar, Straus amd Giroux, 1983 [1929]
I’m also indebted to Christa Wolf’s City of Angels, which is such a masterful meditation on political failure and the impossibility of clean historical reckoning; Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell, for its radical conciseness and its ability to narrate alienation in both dynamic and claustrophobic terms; Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, obviously, for teaching us how delirium and excess can exorcise us from the fascist inside all of us; and Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us, which I believe is single-handedly the most powerful political treatise to come out of Europe in a long time.
City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
Christa Wolf
Translated from the German by Damion Searles
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014 [2010]
That Smell & Notes from Prison
Sonallah Ibrahim
Edited and translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell
New Directions, 2013 [1966]
Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers
Pierre Guyotat
Translated from the French by Romain Slocombe
Creation Books, 2003 [1967]
Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love
Houria Bouteldja
Translated from the French by Rachel Valinsky
Semiotext(e), 2017