Novel
دار المتعة
Not translated into English
Walid Ikhlasi · 1991
Synopsis
The House of Pleasure: in a city where madness haunts every quarter, a palace offers men limitless pleasures, in rooms where incense burns. Djawad is held there by Asmahan, whose seduction drains men's lives, and he puts off his death night after night by telling her stories that do not follow on from one another. From chapter to chapter, the narrative moves from the city and the house to the people and the rulers, and blends the past with the present.
Context
The novel appears in 1991. Its author takes up the situation of the Thousand and One Nights while reversing the roles and the destinies: it is no longer a woman who tells stories to survive a king, but a man who tells stories to escape a woman, and his stories detach from one another instead of nesting. The book is built in tableaux rather than in continuous lines, in a simple and solid language, and shows the persistence of old customs in today's city.
Who it is for
A novel in Arabic, with no French or English translation; it assumes familiarity with the frame of the great collection of Arabic tales, whose principle it reverses.
Prizes and reception
Selected by the General Union of Arab Writers among the one hundred and five best Arab novels of the twentieth century, at twenty-eighth place.