by Wanda Waterman
Volume 22 Issue 23 2014-06-06

Book: Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet

Author: Amara Lakhous

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
– W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas (the “Thomas theorem”)

“Working as a journalist, I’ve come to understand that the reality we confront has neither value nor weight. It’s the imaginary that governs our actions, or, rather, reactions.”
– Amara Lakhous, Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet

Amara Lakhous was born and very well educated in Algiers, Algeria. He moved to Rome at the age of 25. What makes his contributions to Maghreb literature so valuable is not only his experience of the Berber culture that spawned him but also his insights into European culture and the conflicts that have incubated there for centuries. His writing transcends the absurdity and hypocrisy of the strife that surrounds him, in some strange way making it all bearable.

In Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet the city of Turin is rocked once again by tempests in the immigrant teapot; in addition to a series of murders attributed to a clan war between Albanians and Romanians, the Muslim community is in dispute over how to react to a deep insult; a video has been released of a piglet named Gino wandering around the prayer room at a local mosque. (Read the rest here.)