Novel
الوباء
Not translated into English
Hani al-Rahib · 1981
Synopsis
The epidemic: in al-Shir, a village hemmed in between two mountain massifs, the old sheikh al-Sindiyan, patriarch of a clan of peasants, marries a seventeen-year-old girl at seventy, the morning after a night of blood; the son who is born will one day kill ten men of the al-Mu'tazz clan. The book then follows the generations of this lineage, from the Ottoman Empire to the French mandate, then to the military men who seize power and the country's wealth in Syria after 1963.
Context
The novel appears in 1981. Its author raises in it, without answering it, the question of democracy, freedom and the place of the intellectual in a country where critical spirit is killed. The land is its only stable element: it opens and closes the narrative, and it is around it, when the patriarch disappears, that the contradictions between his descendants come to light. The book also shows the rise of certain rural strata under the banner of the army. A conference was also devoted to it in Homs in 2017.
Who it is for
A long novel in Arabic, in which the generations follow one another quickly; it assumes a little knowledge of Syrian history in the twentieth century.
Prizes and reception
Prize of the Union of Arab Writers of Syria in 1981; selected among the hundred best Arabic novels of the twentieth century, and often cited as its author's best-known.