The first century after Beatrice

This novel by Amin Maalouf, fierce and tender, playful and serious, calls for more than one interpretation, it is a novel of "maternal" love for a father towards his daughter, and a novel of a man clinging to "the femininity of the world". And a novel of a mysterious disease that kills women and gnaws at men, and a novel about the division of our planet into a collapsing south and a complaining north, and a novel about the terrifying encounter between the evils of Salafism and the wickedness of modernity. Perhaps this novel, above all, is a novel of the perplexing end of our era, and it casts a worried look at the powerful present of the twenty-first century, which the author ambiguously calls "the first century after Beatrice".