This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Like the elegantly dense mosaic patterns that Thompson fills the background of his pages with, Habibi is a book that weaves isolated shapes into an overpowering tableaux, its pieces carefully fit together and subtly repeated until a gorgeous unity emerges. It is a book that takes as its subject everything from the binding power of love to mystic numerology, the destructive appetites of the powerful to the glorious transcendence of mythmaking, and never merely glances at any subject. For that matter, his lively use of Arabic also ties into Thompson’s headlong dive into Islam, an unstated but impressive attempt to understand a culture that has spent the last decade being resolutely othered, to break it down into its human components.īut limiting yourself to any one perspective on Thompson’s epic would be a mistake. Though you could argue the undercurrent of letters feeds the river of stories that wash over the book, such as Dodola explaining the world to Zam through Koranic and Arabic myth, a kind of motherly Scheherazade. To a degree, it’s a wonderful synecdoche for what Thompson is doing throughout Habibi: finding the wonder in that hides just under our noses, in this case in the story’s central couple, Dodola and Zam, young slaves brought together by their exile. Activate your Online Access Now Article content

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Habibi book craig thompson