Karim Miské presents “Arab Jazz”

The presentation is taking place on March 25 at La Central in Callao.

On Wednesday, March 25, French-Mauritanian documentary filmmaker Karim Miské will be in Madrid to present his first novel, Arab Jazz, awarded with the Grand Prize for Crime Literature of 2012 in France.

At the presentation, to be held at La Central in Callao at 7:30 p.m., Miské will be accompanied by Karim Hauser, who is responsible for Casa Árabe’s Governance Area, Juan Carlos Galindo, a journalist in the Culture section of El País, and César Solís, from the Adriana Hidalgo publishing firm.

In Arab Jazz, Miské points out both a social context of discrimination based on ethnicities and beliefs, and the hypocrisy and methods of manipulation used by fanatical religious groups. The novel takes place in conflict-filled District 19 of Paris, a suburb which is thrown into turmoil one day because the body of a young air hostess is found, in what seems to be a murder based on religious motives. As Lieutenants Jean Hamelot and Rachel Kupferstein move forward in their investigation, suspicion lies with different groups (Muslims, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses), and there appear to be ties with a synthetic drug trafficking ring and people at high levels within the Parisian police force, making the plot thicken even more.
 
Born in Abidjan in 1964, Miské is the son of a Mauritanian father and French mother. He grew up in Paris before returning to Dakar to study journalism. He is currently living in France. He has made documentary films on a wide range of subjects: Jewish, Catholic and Muslim neo-fundamentalism; bioethics, and deafness, which is how he learned to use sign language. Arab Jazz is his first novel.