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"I loved this book when I read it in Arabic. The Penguin's Song is a classic novel of the Lebanese civil war."--Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman"Sixteen years after appearing in Daoud's native Lebanon, this elegiac novel has finally arrived in English . . . Daoud's novel seems to have inherted its sensibilities--its recursive and dense sentences, its damaged narrator, its poignant obsession with lost time--from Remembrance of Things Past or Notes From the Underground. . . . This is a novel about the trap of poverty--but also an affirmation of the Underground Man’s noted maxim: 'I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness.'"--Paul Toutonghi, The New York Times Book Review"In The Penguin's Song, a city falls, a father dies, two women walk the same road over and over, a boy with a broken body dreams of love.