The Oblivion Seekers

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Description

Stories and journal notes by an abnormal young woman—adventurer and traveler, Arabic scholar, Sufi mystic and adept of the Djillala cult.

“Not long before her death Isabelle Eberhardt wrote: “No one ever lived more from day to day or was more dependent upon chance. It is the inescapable chain of events that has brought me to this point, reasonably than I who have caused these things to happen.” Her life seems haphazard, at the mercy of caprice, but her writings prove in a different way. She did not make decisions; she was impelled to do so. Her nature combined an abnormal singlness of purpose and an equally powerful nostalgia for the not possible.” —Paul Bowles, preface.

“One of the most strangest human documents that a woman has given the world.” —Cecily Mackworth, I Came Out of France

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) was an explorer who lived and traveled extensively right through North Africa. She wrote of her travels in a lot of books and French newspapers, including Nouvelles Algériennes [Algerian News] (1905), Dans l’Ombre Chaude de l’Islam [In the Hot Shade of Islam] (1906), and Les journaliers [The Day Laborers] (1922).

Paul Bowles has taped and translated a lot of peculiar legends and lively stories recounted by Mrabet: Love with a Few Hairs (novel), The Lemon (novel), The Boy Who Set Fire (stories), Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins (stories), The Beach Café & Look & Move On (autobiography), and The Big Mirror (novella).


Isabelle Eberhardt was an atypical woman, and we’re fortunate to glimpse her unique meld of European angst and Algerian verve. We’re equally lucky for Paul Bowles’s sympathetic, robust biography that precedes Eberhardt’s 13 short stories. Born in Switzerland in 1877 and dead by 1904 in Algeria, Eberhardt spent her childhood dressed as a boy and her short adulthood living a journalist’s life in Africa, full of luck and illness, passion and melancholy. From that intricate mix, her stories set in the dusty heat of Algerian villages breathe and sigh and radiate the culture and conflicts of her chosen home.

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