Novel
حسن جبل
Not translated into English
Faris Zarzur · 1969
Synopsis
Hasan Jabal: an uneducated peasant who earns his living plastering walls with mud is drawn by the events of his time into the great Syrian revolt against the French mandate and takes up arms. The story is set in the countryside and in the Hauran, among peasants crushed by poverty and injustice. It is less concerned with the fighting than with the man behind the rifle, with his fear, his misery and the people around him, men and women who each carry the resistance in their own way.
Context
The book was published in Damascus in 1969, by the Ministry of Culture, in the same year as the second part of the historical trilogy in which it belongs, and seven years after the investigation its author had devoted to the struggles for freedom in his country. Zarzur wrote it on the basis of his meetings with the real man whose name it bears. It does not show the occupier merely as a source of oppression: it also brings to light the exploitation of the peasants by the local notables.
Who it is for
A book in Arabic, with no French edition. Note that the reader is assumed to know about the defeat at Maysalun in 1920 and the years of revolt that followed it.
Prizes and reception
Prize of the Higher Council of Letters and Arts; a Palestinian novelist ranks it among the Arabic novels that mattered in the twentieth century.