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Record W4379530645 · doi:10.1353/wlt.2011.0207

The Calligrapher's Secret by Rafik Schami , Anthea Bell (review)

2011· article· en· W4379530645 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Issa J. Boullata

Bibliographic record

VenueWorld Literature Today · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGermanArt historyArtLiteraturePlot (graphics)HistoryArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

featured in the guidebooks. Bea's questrequires twotrips toParisand, bychoice, anexcursion toCalifornia, thus becoming herbrother's ambassadortorestore a fragmented family towholeness, butwith dubioussuccess .LikeJames, Ozickis a moralist ,cynically referring to thefaux expatriates whodescend onParisto livetheexistentialist life as "literary tourists/' as distinct fromthereal expatriates. Foreign Bodies isCynthia Ozick'smost mature novel; notonly istheproselushandpoetic, buther insights into a family where a Jewish American prince demotes hissister toa courier areruefully accurate. Bernard F.Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University RafikSchami.The Calligrapher's Secret. Anthea Bell, tr.Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2011. 444 pages. $20.isbn 978-1-56656-830-2 Considered oneoftheleading immigrantwritersin Germany, Rafik Schami(whoserealnameis Suheil Fadel) continues to charmreaders with his fictioninspiredby life in Syria,his originalhomeland. Born in Damascus in 1946 to a Christian father who was a baker, he migrated to Germany in 1971, where he earned a doctoratein chemistry atHeidelberg University and thenworkedin thechemical industry in Germany. In 1982he decidedto devotehimself fullyto writing fiction in German. He has written twenty-seven worksoffictionso far - some translated into morethantwenty-one languages and has received prestigious European literary prizes,including the Hermann Hesse Prizein 1994and theNellySachsPrizein 2006.Die DunkleSeitederLiebe(2004; Eng. The Dark Side of Love,2009),his longestnovel at 853 pages, was beautifully translated intoEnglish by AntheaBell and publishedby Interlink in2009. In TheCalligrapher's Secret , Bell now delights readerswithanother ofSchami's novels, halfas longbut equallycharming and entertaining. It has another plot,of course,but itsstyle is thesame:unhurried, leisurely , relaxed. Schami clearly enjoys describing indetailsettings, actions, and reactions thatmayor maynot matter to thenarrative structure of the whole butarefascinating observations aboutthemanners andcustoms ofthepeopleinDamascus, their religiousandethnic diversity, andmidtwentieth -century Syrian life. Theplotisabouttheloveaffair ofNoura, a married Muslim woman, andSalman, a Christian calligraphy apprentice; it is also aboutHamid Farsi, Noura's Muslim husband, a mastercalligrapher who has an ambition toreform theArabic script and who is thus distracted from caringforhis wife.The love-affair theme pales against the scriptreform themethatdominatesthe narration and is arguably themain plot, being only a metaphor for what is deemedtobe theurgent needto reform Muslimsociety. Thereis a fiercestruggle betweenthe secret "Society oftheWise/'ledbyHamid Farsi, thatembraces modernity and the fundamentalist "Pure Ones" who tenaciously defendthe holy language oftheQur'ananditsArabic scriptagainstall change.The novel tells about the engrossing experiences ofallparties. Anthea Bell, who is an acclaimed and award-winning Britishtranslator , is superbinherrendering ofRafik Schami'sstyle with itsinnuendos, humor, and endearingportrayal ofArablife. IssaJ.Boullata Montreal JacquesTardi.The Extraordinary Adventures ofAdeleBlanc-Sec. Vol. 1. KimThompson, tr.Seattle, Washington . Fantagraphics (W.W.Norton, distr.). 2010.96 pages,ill.$24.99. isbn 978-1-60699-382-8 Caught somewhere onthestructural continuum between thecomicbook and thegraphic novel,thegraphic albumwas thestapleoftheFrench bande dessinee (BD)industry fordecades untilL'Association and other "alternative" BD publishers forged an audienceforlonger booksinthe early 1990s. Thealbum istraditionallya forty-eight-page hardcover volumeandfeatures higher production values and largerpage sizes than itsAmerican cousins. Theresult isa form than caneasily beartheweight ofhigher panelcounts perpageand moretext.Therehas alwaysbeen someresistance to theform in the UnitedStatesdue to thehighratio ofpenniesto pages in comparison 68 1 World Literature Today ...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.429
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.209
Teacher spread0.197 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

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Citations0
Published2011
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