Prairies of Fever is one of the foremost modernist novels of our time. A
negation of chronology and sequence, a cohesve relationship between form
and content, and a temporal parallelism of events, memories and dreams,
give the novel a unique tenor. The central character, Muhammad Hammad,
is a young teacher hired, like hundreds of others from all over the Arab
world, to teach in a remote part of the Arabian peninsula. The novel
recounts his harrowing struggle to retain any sense of identity at all
in the bleak and alienating place he finds himself in, caught between
the infinite expanse of desert and the intolerable narrowness of village
life. His psychic and physical anguish, beset as he is by
hallucinations, fantasies and the indifference of the villagers, is
mirrored in the writing of the novel: time appears unfixed as the story
jumps from past to future and back to the present; there is an eerie
fusion of the animal and human worlds; and reality and fantasy become
hard to distinguish. The result is an exceptional poetic novel,
disturbing, evocative and deeply moving.