world: tunisia | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tunisia.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Salammbô	Gustave Flaubert	6,550	2,059
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization	Richard Miles	4,664	938
The Ardent Swarm	Yamen Manai	8,352	315
The Tremor of Forgery	Patricia Highsmith	2,833	622
Benny and Omar	Eoin Colfer	895	301
The African Quest	Lyn Hamilton	475	204
The Italian	Shukrī Mabkhoūt	2,737	26
The Pillar of Salt	Albert Memmi	459	155

Well, there are a couple of names on that list who I did not expect to see. But it’s a fair cop; both Patricia Highsmith and Eoin Colfer have put their protagonists in Tunisia for the whole book.

There is a real schism between LibraryThing and Goodreads here. Normally the ratio between the two is somewhere around ten or twenty GR raters for every LT user. But the books above by non-Tunisian writers score surprisingly well on LT – the ratio varies from 2.3 (The African Quest) to 5.0 (Carthage Must Be Destroyed). And a phenomenon I had previously observed, that Goodreads scores very well among Arabic speakers and LibraryThing very poorly, is dramatically illustrated here: The Italian, by Shukrī Mabkhoūt, has over a hundred times as many raters on GR as owners on LT.

This week’s winner is Salammbô, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert set around 140 BCE.during one of the wars between Rome and Carthage. It was his next novel after Madame Bovary and was followed by Sentimental Education. It sounds a bit melodramatic but was clearly popular enough at the time, and indeed now.

This week’s Goodreads winner is a 2017 novel, The Ardent Swarm (originally L’Amas ardent), by Yamen Manai, a Tunisian writer based in Paris. It is about a rural bee-keeper who goes to the city looking for answers to what is happening to his hives, and finds revolution in full flow when he gets there. It is only 174 pages and may well be worth a look.

I hesitated a bit about the eligibility of Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles, as it clearly covers the whole Carthaginian Empire, which at its peak covered all of North Africa apart from Egypt and chunks of Spain, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. But I decided in the end that it probably focuses enough on the territory which is now in Tunisia to be eligible.

I disqualified fourteen books for various reasons, too many to list them all. The only one I’m going to call attention to is The Muqaddimah, by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldūn, full name Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami, the introduction to his seventeen-volume history of the world, which is pioneering in its approach to historical verification and to sociology.

Next up is South Sudan, the last African country for a while, and also the first country that I have actually visited since the Netherlands back in September. After that will come Haiti, lovely Belgium and then Jordan.

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Tag Archives: world: tunisia

The best known books set in each country: Tunisia