2084: The End of the World
3/5
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About this ebook
A tribute to George Orwell’s 1984 and a cry of protest against totalitarianism of all kinds.
It is the year 2084. In the kingdom of Abistan—named messenger of the god Yolah—citizens submit to a single god, demonstrating their devotion by kneeling in prayer nine times a day. Autonomous thought has been banned, remembering is forbidden, and an omnipresent surveillance system instantly informs the authorities of every deviant act, thought, or idea. The kingdom is blessed and its citizens are happy, filled with a sense of purpose and piety. Those who are not—the heretics—are put to death by stoning or beheading in city squares. But Ati has met people who think differently; in ghettos and caves, hidden from the authorities and their ubiquitous surveillance, exist the last living free-thinkers of Abistan. Under their influence, Ati begins to doubt. He begins to think. Now, he must defend his thoughts with his life.
“[In 2084] Sansal dared to go much further than I did,” said Michel Houellebecq, the controversial author of Submission. 2084 is a cry of freedom, a call to rebellion, a gripping satirical novel of ideas, and an indictment of the religious fundamentalism that, with its hypocrisy and closedmindeness, threatens our modern democracies and the ideals on which they are founded.
Boualem Sansal
Boualem Sansal is the Arab world’s most courageous and controversial novelist. His first novel to appear in English (An Unfinished Business/The German Mujahid, Bloomsbury/Europa) was the first work of fiction by an Arab writer to acknowledge the Holocaust in print. He started writing novels at the age of 50, shortly after retiring as a high-ranking official in the Algerian government. He was awarded the prestigious Prix du Roman Arabe in 2012, and the German Peace Prize in 2011.
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Reviews for 2084
50 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A young man confined to a TB sanatorium in the high mountains is forced to reconsider some of his most basic assumptions about the world he is living in ... hang on a minute, this is supposed to be a new take on Orwell, not Thomas Mann, isn't it? Anyway, it soon becomes clear that we aren't in Davos any more, Toto, but in a dystopian, post-nuclear world, where a benevolent leader, Abi (even I know that means "elder brother", so we're back on track), his face on millions of posters, protects his people against a remote but always dangerous enemy, in return for their devotion and complete submission to the intrusion of the state into every corner of their lives and thoughts. This isn't quite the 1984 we're used to, though. The use of Abilang (Newspeak) constrains the things that can be said and thought, there is no history of any time earlier than 2084, but in place of Orwell's metaphor of the Party, Abistan is a world run under the religious slogan that "there is no god but Yölah, and Abi is his representative". It turns out that a cruelly distorted version of Islam can be used to create a totalitarian, fascist society every bit as effectively as Stalinism did. As in Orwell's original, we're well aware that a lot of the horrors and abuses Sansal describes are not a million miles away from things that happen in the real world in our time. It's only really the scale that changes in this dystopian view: Abistan claims to be the whole world, but our Winston Smith character, Ati, has his doubts: there are rumours of a frontier, and if there is a frontier, then there must be something on the other side of that frontier. Clever, angry, engaged humanism, very engaging once you get into it, although I did find the first few chapters, in which the pace of the story is slowed down to Magic mountain-like speeds, quite hard going. Worth the effort, though.