Review of the novel حكايتي شرح يطول
Author: 2005 حنان الشيخ
In her usual articulate story telling technique, Hanan il sheikh in her novel حكايتي شرح يطول, is able to tear down the stage curtains enveloping the world of literature in order to provide a vivid, situated and inescapably inviting tale. The only literary mask in this novel is Hanan's choice of 'novel' as the genre printed on the book cover as opposed to 'biography'.* Her portrayal of her mother's memoires "Kamela" will surely suck you in through the intricate depiction of Lebanon's rural landscape, the village life, the relationships in Beirut and the complexity of life for the illiterate and literate alike. Only a few novels that I have ever read were able to break down the walls between reality and fiction and this story, with its rich contextual narrative, has been the most successful.
At the outset, the characters are located in South Lebanon "بالنبطية" and are artistically utilized to represent a rich account of poverty, childhood and innocence. The voice in the narrative is of Hanan's mother as she experiences a forced marriage, an intense love affair with a neighbor and with the cinema, childbirth, separation, divorce, war and death. You cannot escape being invited into Kamela's family and community as it stands united and divided by class, political ethnicity and gender roles. Kamela, experiences her life from a cinematically romantic perspective combined with an insatiable appetite for the world, love and sweets.
In the end, you depart from the novel in tears as you come to recognize -by living the texture of the history, page by page,- the complexity of the relationship between the writer and the characters. At the same time, I feel at ease, as I am sure others would, by the fact that we all share the same idiocentricities in this serious world, that the possibility of rebellion from social norms is a legacy only tarnished by fools and that the child in every one of us, according to Hanan, will never die.
*Link to a great review in Arabic.
