To browse Academia. The paper discusses the life and work of Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese and French novelist known for his pioneering contributions to historical fiction. It highlights his dual cultural identity, shaped by his diverse heritage and experiences, including his journalism during significant conflicts and his migration to Paris.
The narrative explores how these elements influenced his writing, emphasizing themes of tolerance, identity, and the complexities of cultural intersections. He was the son of a wealthy rancher and landowner, also named Macedonio, and Rosa del Mazo. Known primarily by his given name, the younger Macedonio is widely considered to have propelled later developments in Argentine and Latin American literature, particularly among those writers considered to be part of the Latin American literary "Boom.
Given the diffi culty and outlandishness of his writing, his thought and conversation are considered by many to have been the primary medium of his infl uence; however, several literary critics have recently contested that idea through in-depth studies of his oeuvre, much of which was published decades after his death. Macedonio attended the University of Buenos Aires, where he received the degree of doctor of jurisprudence in He read widely in psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics-especially that of Arthur Schopenhauerand wrote humorous, costumbrista, and philosophical articles for the periodicals El Tiempo and El Progreso.
While still a student, Macedonio began to hold philosophical conversations with his classmate Jorge Borges, father of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. In Macedonio began a correspondence with the American philosopher William James, whom he admired greatly; their epistolary exchange ended only upon the latter's death in In , Macedonio met Elena de Obieta, who became his wife and the mother of his four children.
Elena died in after abdominal surgery, and her death had an immense effect on Macedonio and his later writing. Macedonio ceased practicing law, sent his children to live with relatives, and began to live his life in a combination of vagrancy and seclusion, moving from one boardinghouse to another, with few material possessions. When Jorge Borges and his family-including Jorge Luis-returned from Switzerland in , Macedonio began a friendship with the younger Borges. Borges and other writers from his generation eventually adopted Macedonio as a beloved literary father fi gure, the "Socrates" of Buenos Aires.
