Anima - Paperback

by Wajdi Mouawad (Author), Linda Gaboriau (Translator)

This award-winning novel by playwright Wadji Mouawad is a thriller and a road novel - written in the North African storytelling tradition in which events unfold from an animal point of view.

The novel opens with a brutal murder: the protagonist arrives home to find his wife lying in a pool of blood. Driven by grief and the need to find whoever did this - "I want to see his face, I want to know who he is" - the protagonist sets out on desperate journey from Montreal to Indian reserves along the Canada-U.S. border, south through Civil War sites in the Midwest, to Animas, New Mexico. The furious odyssey awakens long-buried memories that make present circumstances even more painful.

This masterful novel is told in a bestiary of voices, more than fifty animals, birds, and insects, each with their own characterization and style of speaking, reveal the unflattering contrast between the human and the natural. Violent and dark, the novel nevertheless moves beyond the thriller genre to become a book of multiple levels, rich in symbolism and open to complex interpretation. While set in North America, Mouawad's Lebanese roots suffuse the text, which becomes an examination of cultural influences and at the same time an excavation of childhood trauma and the legacy of war.

Anima has resonated with readers worldwide. It's been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. It won the Thyde Monnier Grand Prize from the Société des Gens de Lettres, the Mediterranean Prize, the Literary Prize for a Second Novel in Laval, the Golden Alga Award, the Phoenix Award (as part of the Beirut Spring Festival), and the Catalan Llibreter Prize for Foreign Novel, all in 2012 and 2013. In 2015, Anima won the Lire en Poche, a prize awarded annually in France in celebration of the paperback book. An elegant translation by Linda Gaboriau brings this celebrated novel to English readers.

Author Biography

Playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad was born in Lebanon and then lived in Quebec before settling in France. His play Incendies won critical acclaim and huge success as a film by Denis Villeneuve. In 2009, Mouawad received the Prix du Théâtre of the Académie française. His novel Anima, published in French in 2012 and translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan, won le Grand Prix Thyde Monnier de la Société des gens de lettres, le prix de la Méditerranée, le prix littéraire du deuxième roman de Lecture en tête (Laval), le prix du jury de l'Algue d'or, et le prix catalan Llibreter du roman étranger.

Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montreal. Her translations of plays by Quebec's most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She was the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Gaboriau has twice won the Governor General's Award for Translation: in 1996, for Daniel Danis's Stone and Ashes, and in 2010, for Wajdi Mouawad's Forests. She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.