Catalogo Libri
THE LIFE OF ISABELLE EBERHARDT
During the Summer of 2008, the author of this book travelled to the Algeria region on the south of Oran, next to the Moroccan frontier, to complete her research on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt. That is an area subject to frequent conflicts with the Sahrawi national liberation movement along the borderline. There is no tourism at all, and therefore not so many changes have intervened since a century ago. Much to her surprise, the author found not only places that were exactly the same as at the time of Isabelle, but also people who remembered the young woman for hearing her story by their great-grandfathers who had been her hosts and friends when she arrived there in 1903, preceded by her fame of savant and of sufi. Isabelle was 27 when she died there in 1904, drowned by a flood in the middle of the desert. For the people living in that region she is still a legend.
There are many writings about Isabelle Eberhardt, all more or less incorrect because of her hectic and complex life and of the misleading traces she deliberately left behind her. She was born in Geneva from a Russian family, and travelled with a Russian passport to France and to North Africa with a man's name and man's dresses. Later she became a French citizen by marriage with a French-Algerian officer. She spoke French and Russian, Latin and Greek, and Arabic. She was a scholar of the Quran, embraced Islam and with the man's name of Mahmoud Saadi became a member of a Sufi confraternity. But she was also a writer and a journalist travelling in the Maghrib as a war correspondent for French and Algerian newspapers. She was a friend of sheiks and imams, but also of high officers of the French army. That caused her to be suspected of being a secret agent, both by the French and by the Algerians.
This book tells the adventurous life of a brave, passionate woman. A short, eventful life culminating in a dramatic death.
THIS BOOK RECEIVED THE GAMBRINUS "GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTI" AWARD in the Travel and Exploration Literature section for 2011
ca. 38,000 words
text in Italian (O.G.E. 2010)
world rights except for Italy
Mirella Tenderini is an award-winning author of books on mountaineering and exploration, including the biographies of American mountaineer Gary Hemming and of the Duke of the Abruzzi, translated and published in several different countries. She translates books from four languages and is also the author of a history of exploration of East Africa and of the biographies of the famous British explorer Ernest Shackleton and of the French painter Paul Gauguin),