Novel
الشراع والعاصفة
Not translated into English
Hanna Mina · 1966
Synopsis
La Voile et la Tempête: Latakia during the Second World War, under the French mandate. The sailor al-Tarousi lost his boat in a shipwreck; he now runs a café on the old port, where seafarers gather, but never stops wanting to take to the sea again and face the storms once more. Around him, the nationalist parties and blocs oppose one another, the French stoke their quarrels and the great landowners fight over the port, while a rivalry sets him against Ibn Barru until it comes to confrontation.
Context
Its author's second novel, published by Dar al-Adab in Beirut twelve years after the first, the book had been begun, according to him, in the early fifties; it appears after his years of exile. The author, who had himself worked on the port and at sea, makes the sailor a hero of will. The book has been translated into Russian and Italian, and Ghassan Shmeit brought it to the screen in 2011.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred and sixty pages in Arabic, realistic and lively; the sea and the port count for as much as the characters.
Prizes and reception
Ranked fourteenth among the one hundred and five best Arab novels by the Arab Writers Union; prize of the Higher Council of Letters of Damascus in 1968 and an Italian prize in 1993.