Novel
جيل القدر
Not translated into English
Muta Safadi · 1960
Synopsis
The generation of destiny: in Damascus, in the fifties, Nabil and his comrades hold that the struggle against the colonizer must end in a single Arab state. They talk at night, love badly, watch one another, and a plot to assassinate the dictator takes shape among them. One day Hassan shows a drawing in which their faces, heads enlarged and bodies shrunken, spin in a whirlwind blown by a devil's face, and asks Nabil to name that devil.
Context
The volume appeared in Beirut in 1960 and was meant to open a Damascene sequence that its author wanted to call the city of seven rivers; a second novel followed the very next year, after which he abandoned fiction for philosophy and politics. The reception was harsh: some denied it even the name of novel, others saw in it only an existentialist dressing of unitary ideology, and one of them accused its author of having taken his subject from Les Mains sales. The centre he directed has reissued it.
Who it is for
Three hundred and twenty-six pages of Arabic in the current reprint, with no French version. The narrative is more concerned with the inner lives of the characters than with the sequence of events, and the political discussions in it are long.
Prizes and reception
The book through which existentialism enters Syrian fiction, and of which it was later written that Arab youth held it almost sacred.