Departures: Selected Writings

by Isabelle Eberhardt

As usual, Isabelle Eberhardt's stormy love affair with the Algerian desert sets the physical and emotional scene in this collection of short stories. Written in French in the late 1800s and translated by Karim Hamdy and Laura Rice, her characters live, love, work, and die with passions as fierce and brutal as the midday sun, reflections as gentle as the evening breeze, and happiness as beautiful and fleeting as the spring desert in bloom. As in 'The Oblivion Seekers,' Eberhardt's descriptions and voices are as lyrical, harsh, and ultimately captivating as the North African land and people she knew. "This selection of short stories, reportage, and travel journals, which glow with sensuous detail, superbly evokes the life of the desert towns and nomadic peoples of the Saharan region of Morocco and Algeria. As a radical individualist, Eberhardt identified with and defended the oppressed; yet she was a romantic as well, and ambiguous about the 'civilizing' role of France. Today she has become an iconic figure at the center of discussions about gender, race, colonialism, representation, and writing."— Bridge Over Traveled Water

Genres: Travel, Fiction, Algeria, Africa

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Isabelle Eberhardt was a Swiss-Algerian explorer and writer who lived and travelled extensively in North Africa. For the time she was an extremely liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favour of her own path and that of Islam. Dressed as a man, calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi, Eberhardt travelled in Arab society, with a freedom she could not otherwise have experienced. She died in a flash flood in the desert at the age of 27.

Reviews

[Mohamed Bourezi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a collection of short stories and descriptions of Isabelle Iberhardt journey through out Algeria. At the end of the book there are 3 interesting and critical essays that reflect on her ambiguous journey and character as a nomad. Apart from some of her astute descriptions and her identification with marginalised women and outcasts,which are in the center of her short short stories, one can't ignore the orientalist path that goes from subtle to clear in most of her descriptions.

[Avishai Micaiah · Rating 5 out of 5]

eberhardt was amazing. she used travel and sex to escape the binds of conventional european society. often dressed as a man, she converted to islam and spent the latter half of her short life (she was killed in a flash flood in the arabian desert at 27) drinking more than a legionnaire, smoking more kif than a hashish addict, and making love for the love of making love.