Novel
In Search of Walid Masoud
البحث عن وليد مسعود
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra · 1978
Synopsis
Walid Masoud, a Palestinian intellectual and activist who has lived in Baghdad since 1948, telephones a friend to say that he is leaving without saying where. His car is found abandoned near Rutba, on the road to Syria, with a tape he was recording while driving: on it he speaks of his childhood and of a woman, Shahd, whom no one knows. His friends in Baghdad, a doctor, lawyers, artists, speak in turn to say who he was.
Context
The novel appeared from Dar al-Adab in Beirut in 1978; its author had been living in Baghdad for thirty years. It is made up of the monologues of five friends of the missing man, with no narrator to settle matters, and the reader reconstructs the portrait himself. France M. Douvier translated it into French for Lattès in 1988, Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar into English in 2000; a Spanish translation appeared in 2024. Jabra received the al-Owais prize in 1989.
Who it is for
A novel of ideas of nearly four hundred pages, in several voices; it can be read in French in the 1988 translation.
Prizes and reception
Praised for its polyphonic form, it is regarded as its author's major novel and a milestone of the modern Arabic novel.
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