Aymen Gharbi

Magma Tunis

August 30, 2019
Novel
192 pages
140 × 200 mm
16 €
9782918767800
978-2-9187-6780-0

“Fictions” collection

																Aymen Gharbi, Magma Tunis
																Aymen Gharbi, Magma Tunis

Magma Tunis is a luminous first novel about disenchanted Tunisian youth, a few years after a Jasmine Revolution that did not keep all its promises, yet it remains a very humane portrait of the city of Tunis and its inhabitants.

Ghaylène, a young urban planner is at the end of his rope: his girlfriend is leaving him, his bathroom ceiling is collapsing and he is stagnating professionally. After a fight, he locks his fiancée in his apartment and wanders through the streets of Tunis. It will be an opportunity for some crazy encounters, each one more than the other. His wandering allows the author to paint a striking portrait of the Tunisian youth disenchanted by the Jasmin revolution. Horn horns, barking, insults, stench, heat, stray dogs, alley cats invading the city, rats proliferating: Aymen Gharbi’s highly sensory writing immerses the reader in the chaos of the city and gives a unique image of Tunis.

The author

Aymen Gharbi was born in 1981 in Tunisia. He studied French literature between Tunis and Paris, particularly the relationship between television series and serial novels. La ville des impasses is his second novel after Magma Tunis, published by Asphalte Editions in 2018. He benefited from a writing residency at the Lattara Museum in Montpellier (France) in 2019.

Strong points

One of the few fictional texts that captures the complexity and contradictions of post-Arab revolutionary Tunisian society.

A crazy universe with unusual characters and an outrageous ending reminiscent of Kusturica-style atmospheres.

August 30, 2019
Novel
192 pages
140 × 200 mm
16 €
9782918767800
978-2-9187-6780-0

“Fictions” collection