Distracted [Paperback]

Jalal Toufic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 1991

The author, son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, lived in Lebanon for 17 years; this extraordinary fictionalized memoir derives much of its intensity from Toufic's exposure to three of the world s most devastated peoples. Viewing life through the eyes of Nietzsche and Kafka, he deftly turns sitting in a cafe into an autobiographical narrative blended with philosophy and observations on cinema gleaned from his own experience as a filmmaker. The text turns on a metaphoric excavation of an always underway process or state of 'distraction' - A state which for Toufic is not so much an attitude or level of concentration as it is an ontological modality. Insightful, funny, erotic, at times bizarre, Distracted offers an indelible vision of daily life by a man born on the twin currents of art and history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This year has already seen the publication of Toufic's Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post Apollo), a book that among other things unforgettably re-writes various versions of the Orpheus myth, as well as the release of a "revised and expanded" version of (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (also from Post Apollo), first published in 1993, and written for "mortals to death." (Vampires) is a sort of sequel to Toufic's 1991 debut Distracted, explicitly written for the living and here becoming what Toufic calls an "untimely collaboration" with the author of the original edition and of (Vampires) too. As one proceeds through the book's aphoristic prose paragraphs, very different eras and states of being seem to flow along and past one another and through the speaker's utterly unique sensibility. The book is thus not so much about what happens when Raymond Roussel repeats a sentence but changes billard (pool table) to pillard (plunderer), or about theories of the effects of "surpassing disaster" on cultures (including Jewish and Shi'ite) and literatures, or about reactions to how love, drunkenness and distraction are rendered by (and in) the deeply interconnected media of memory, film and language. Rather, the book records a kind of double or even multiple experience of these things (what Toufic elsewhere calls an "over-turn"), with eternal recurrence and total dissolution as its horizons. There is nothing else in literature like it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Jalal Toufic is a Lebanese artist, filmmaker and author, born to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother. He has lived in Lebanon for about 17 years, and his work often reflects his heritage. Since September 2007 Toufic has lived in Istanbul, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Communication Design at Kadir Has University. He is the author of Distracted (Station Hill, 1991; 2nd ed., Tuumba, 2003), : An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (Station Hill, 1993; 2nd ed., Post Apollo, 2003), Over-Sensitivity (Sun & Moon, 1996), Forthcoming (Atelos, 2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post Apollo, 2002), Two or Three Things I m Dying to Tell You (Post Apollo, 2005), and Âshûrâ : This Blood Spilled in My Veins (Forthcoming Books, 2005)

Product Details

• Paperback: 199 pages
• Publisher: Station Hill Pr (February 2, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0882680595
• ISBN-13: 978-0882680590
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,934,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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