Paving the Sea (Middle East Literature in Translation)

What does it take to build a modern nation-and what happens when that project fails?By turns wryly absurd, unsettling, and deeply moving, Rashid El-Daif’s novel Paving the Sea narrates a quest for the impossible and the disillusionment with the transformative promises of the nation.At the center of the story is Jurji Zaidan, the real-life intellectual giant of the Arab Nahda, the cultural renaissance that sought to remake the Arabic-speaking world through modern science and secular thought.Zaidan and his fictionalized friend Fares Hashem attend university where the two young idealists campaign to bring Darwin’s theory of natural selection into the curriculum.When their reward is expulsion, they depart provincial Mount Lebanon and Fares sets out for the West with grand ambitions.But the pursuit of enlightenment proves far more complicated than either imagined. El-Daif tells this story with a sardonic narrator who comments freely on events, collapsing the distance between past and presen