Novel
الوسمية
Not translated into English
Abdulaziz Mishri · 1982
Synopsis
The Rain of the wasm: in thirteen tableaux, the novel shows the daily life of a mountain village in the al-Baha region in the 1950s, before the rise of oil. The villagers watch for the rains of the wasm season, celebrate weddings according to their customs, invoke divine justice against the man who refuses to admit a wrong, and settle through mediation the quarrel born of sheep that strayed onto the reserved pastures of a neighbouring village. The narrative combines narration, dialogue and local speech.
Context
The author's first novel, published in 1982 according to the Riyadh Review of Books and Goodreads, the book was also published in Cairo, by Dar Shahdi, in 1984. The Riyadh Review of Books stresses its meticulous description and the place given to dialect expressions, and ranks Mishri among the realists attentive to the tension between village and city. Readers see in it less a continuous plot than a series of episodes in which the village plays the leading role. An ecocritical study by Tahani al-Juhani was devoted to it in 2024.
Who it is for
A short novel, of a hundred and sixty pages, made of tableaux rather than a plot; no French or English translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
Fahd al-Atiq saw in it, in 2000, the finest novel of the country, accomplished in its art as in its subject.
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