Edna POLITI

"The Sphinx's smile"

In a narrative in the style of a baroque tale that deliberately blends real and imaginary worlds, the author explores and reinterprets her Middle East and her commitments.

As a Jewish Lebanese woman who became an Israeli and then a Franco-European woman living in Geneva, these multiple and contradictory affiliations are what makes up her own unity.

Her encounters more than 30 years later with some of her film characters (Lebanese, Israelis, Palestinians), and her confrontation with contemporary reality, have taken her on a journey full of countless twists and turns, interweaving several temporal and narrative modes that represent some of the multiple ways in which we can question History:
- real travels and encounters mixing human warmth, dead ends, violence and questioning;
- motionless travels in front of old papers, photos, films and documents carried along from country to country;
- journeys into an imagined past to retrospectively forge stories that could have actually happened;
- an imaginary journey into the distant future, on a boat that leads her, in the company of a winged cat, from the destroyed heart of Jerusalem to lost islands where survivors are trying to rebuild their stories.

In an unstable and perilous equilibrium, the book thus travels through time and space, borrowing from the Thousand and One Nights the endless interweaving of stories that maintains suspense, and the use of the imaginary and magic as integral parts of reality.