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Translated from the French and with a preface by Paul
Bowles
‘She was the first hippy. She travelled with no money
living from day to day; she had no concept that chastity was
of any value and was sexually voracious; she was into kif-smoking
and she lived in Morocco dressed as a man.’ – Juliet
Stevenson
Isabelle Eberhardt’s life was one of the most extraordinary
of any writer’s of the last 150 years.
Daughter of a Russian Nihilist who forbade her any contact
with society, dressed her as a man and insisted her education
consisted of hard physical labour, she, perhaps unsurprisingly,
ran away to North Africa in 1897, aged twenty. There she travelled
through the Sahara and became one of the few white women ever
to have been initiated into Sufism. She also produced a small
but exceptional body of writing.
The Oblivion Seekers is a selection of her best stories
and vignettes of African life, including several excerpts
from the unfinished work her biographer Cecily Mackworth called
‘one of the strangest documents that a woman has given
to the world’. It is superbly translated, with a biographical
preface, by the American novelist Paul Bowles.
‘Limpid, quietly ecstatic sketches of life and death.’
– Times Literary Supplement
‘Strongly atmospheric.’ – Time Out
‘Thirteen evocative glimpses into Eberhardt‘s fiercely
nomadic life.’ – Blitz
‘Highly literary, evocative, romantic.’ – Kathy
Acker, Guardian
ISABELLE EBERHARDT was born in Geneva in 1877, the illegitimate
daughter of a former Russian-orthodox priest and a part-Russian,
part-German aristocrat. She spent much of her short adult
life in North Africa where she converted to Islam. She was
killed in a flash flood in 1904, at the age of twenty-seven. |
