Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the other hand, “The Storm” is a text steeped in the fantastical. An ominous line opens the story—“It all happened when the sun was high in the sky”—before describing a storm that descended on the alley and its residents. It is like nothing the quarter has seen before, and by the time it blows over, many of the residents have been robbed of their belongings. Despair settles over the alley and its recurring characters as they await the start of a new day. Beyond the eighteen texts included in The Quarter, publisher Saqi Books also included scanned versions of the original Arabic texts as well as Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech from 1988. While the former was placed in the book to alleviate doubts as to the authenticity of the work, the latter was included as a reminder of Mahfouz’s character—the “son of two civilizations,” the Pharaonic civilization and the Islamic one. It is through this modest and deeply empathetic speech that readers gain further understanding of the man now considered the godfather of the modern Arabic novel. While The Quarter does not contain the sophisticated characters or detailed landscapes that characterize Mahfouz’s realist phase in the 1940s and 1950s, and certainly does not represent the best of the Nobel laureate’s creative talents, it still contains glimpses of the master’s genius. Despite the range of ideas presented in the collection , the stories remain interconnected, weaving a thematic web of ideas that start to resemble the narrow roads within the alleyways of the quarter itself. In this world where many characters are unnamed, where time is displaced, and where logic plays second fiddle to the absurd, it is the quarter that emerges to take center stage as the story’s protagonist. The Quarter is a worthy tribute to the experimentalism that Mahfouz undertook in Arabic literature and a recommended read for those who want to understand how the Arab world’s most celebrated novelist earned the title “The Master.” Be warned, however: this is not a book for those committed to Western genre conventions or for those who believe that the rules of traditional English-language literature are not to be broken. This is a book that insists that our modes of writing are endless, even if the scope of the stories is limited—one final reminder that in order to fully appreciate Mahfouz, you must free yourself from the shackles of traditional Western writing. Karim Zidan is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist, creative writer, and translator with bylines in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and VOX Media, among others. Salman Rushdie Quichotte New York. Penguin Random House. 2019. 416 pages. SALMAN RUSHDIE, the much-celebrated as well as vilified Indian-born British author of the novels Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, among others, has come up with a firecracker of a new novel. Not one to pull a punch, Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte, foregrounds the ideals of ubiquitous love and tolerance in a world that is consistently veering toward hatred, exclusion, and intolerance. Against the backdrop of rising hostility among and within nations as well as individuals, Rushdie endeavors to find a fine balance between history and fiction through a reinterpretation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. But his work does not end there: he provides insights into the rotten state of contemporary times by remaining fully grounded in the past. The quest for a rather unrealistic love and left Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize winner, is widely considered the godfather of the modern Arabic novel. WORLDLIT.ORG 75 Books in Review an unflinching desire to believe in the power of love against all odds remain at the crux of the novel. Through the sprawling and deep love stories of Quichotte, Rushdie unveils the deteriorating postcolonial condition and posthumanist imaginations. Quichotte’s conviction that “love will find a way” shapes his entire being, and this rumination dominates his life in all aspects. The multifarious aspects of love and acceptance find an array of expressions in the novel. Fact and fiction are interspersed, and the reality of living in contemporary times is unleashed through real and fictional stories. Rushdie thus...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.143 | 0.089 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".