Novel
كانت السماء زرقاء
Not translated into English
Ismail Fahd Ismail · 1970
Synopsis
In the Iraq that follows the 1963 coup, a hunted intellectual tries to flee to Iran by the Shatt al-Arab and the marshes, leaving behind his wife and a woman in a blue dress. His escape fails; he comes across an officer wounded by a bullet, and helping him exposes him to arrest: should he save him, cross the border or return to the woman he loves? The facts are told in the third person, the thoughts in the first, and two printing typefaces separate these two voices.
Context
Written in 1965, the novel was published in Beirut in 1970 by Dar al-Awda, with a preface by the Egyptian poet Salah Abdel Sabour, who saw in it an important work of Arabic literature, a twentieth-century fiction coming from an Arab East without a novelistic tradition. It was the author's first novel. A construction close to cinema, stream of consciousness and a double typography make it an experimental text for its time.
Who it is for
A short, experimental novel, in Arabic, which requires attentive reading; no translation of it has been found.
Prizes and reception
Reissued at least eight times, it is read as the founding text of a body of work that earned its author the nickname of father of Kuwaiti literature.
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