Novel
أيام معه
Not translated into English
Colette Khoury · 1959
Synopsis
Rim, a Christian from Damascus not yet twenty, becomes attached to Ziad Mustafa, a Muslim musician who is already well known and twice her age. She breaks, one by one, the rules imposed on the girls of her city, gives everything without demanding anything, and tells the story herself without cutting anything. He is irritated by a love that binds him and asks her to accept that he comes and goes. The day comes when she must choose between keeping him as he is and keeping herself.
Context
The book was published in Beirut in 1959 and went through seven printings up to 2001. Critics immediately read in it its author's affair with Nizar Qabbani; she let the rumour run for a long time, then acknowledged having lived with him a plan of marriage two years before writing, while regarding her character as a composite of several men. The man in the book is a musician, a Muslim, much older than the Christian narrator. The scandal had less to do with the subject matter than with the person speaking, a woman saying I.
Who it is for
A novel in Arabic, in the first person, with no French or English edition. The reader of 1959 looked in it for the key to a real story.
Prizes and reception
Her best-known book, chosen by Ahdaf Soueif among the great Arab love novels; it is regarded as the birth certificate of intimate women's writing in Arabic.