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Overview
It's 2005. The Italian secret service has received intel that a group of Muslim immigrants based in the Viale Marconi neighborhood of Rome is planning a terrorist attack. Christian Mazzari, a young Sicilian who speaks perfect Arabic, goes undercover to infiltrate the group and to learn who its leaders are. Christian poses as Issa, a recently arrived Tunisian in search of for a job and a place to sleep. He soon meets Sofia, a young Egyptian immigrant dressed in a burqa who lives in the neighborhood with her husband Said, a.k.a. Felice, an architect who has reinvented himself in Italy as a pizza cook.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Lakhous (Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio) deftly satirizes political, cultural, and religious corruption in this clever comedy of errors. Sicilian narrator Christian Mazzari, code name Issa “the Tunisian,” is an excitable “Arabist” student recruited by SISMI, Italian military intelligence in 2005, to infiltrate the Arab Muslim community in Rome and learn about “Operation Little Cairo” (Little Cairo being an “international calling center”). Issa shares narration duties with feisty Egyptian housewife Sophia, a call center patron chronicling her marriage to and multiple divorces from Said, who is called Felice (happy), the Islamic fundamentalist whom she derisively calls “the architect” (he has a degree in architecture but works in a restaurant). Secretly working as a hairdresser to save money for her sister Zeineb’s reconstructive surgery after a botched female circumcision, Sophia walks a minefield between cultures: Islamic, Arab, Egyptian, Italian, and, eventually—as she comes into contact with the handsome Issa—that of “Tunisian” intelligence. Though a quick conclusion leaves a thread or two still untied, the novel still exposes what role personal corruption has played all along in Little Cairo’s political, cultural, and religious intrigue. Issa, who cleaves to aphorisms, knows that “he wolf with a bad conscience thinks the worst of everyone,” and it’s a worthwhile satire that reveals how that wolf is made. (May)The New Yorker
"The author's real subject is the heave and crush of modern, polyglot Rome, and he renders the jabs of everyday speech with such precision that the novel feels exclaimed rather than written."Brooklyn Rail
"A satirical, enigmatic take on the racial tensions that afflict present-day Europe."NPR's Fresh Air
"What's memorable about Lakhous' novel is what he shows us of an often inward-looking nation confronting the teeming vibrancy of multicultural life."Philadelphia Inquirer
"Do we have an Italian Camus on our hands? Just possibly . . . No recent Italian novel so elegantly and directly confronts the 'new Italy.'"Alessandra Stanley
…a delightful way to set the record straight, a whimsical and at times heartbreaking look at the Muslim immigrants who work in pizza kitchens and live in communal apartments near Viale Marconi, a crowded, commercial part of Rome that tourists rarely see. It's hard to find the lighter side of Islamic terrorism or the subjugation of women, but as the title suggests, Divorce Islamic Style does it by scaling those themes down to the size of two ordinary people, Issa and Sofia, who cross paths in ways that can verge on the farcical. They tell their tales in alternating first-person narratives, so the story unfolds like a duet—one in which the singers are in different sound booths and don't know when and where their voices overlap.—The New York Times Book Review