Balcony of the abyss

There are losing battles we fight and are defeated in with a harshness that our status and circumstances cannot bear, but we fight them again. Every time the abyss opens for us, we honor it! With this textual preface, Ibrahim Nasrallah draws the reader into the core of "The Balcony of the Abyss" and gives him the keys to exploration, to delve into its unknowns, and to illuminate its dark areas through a galaxy of intellectual and cultural propositions that the elements of the text will explode during the act of reading. It is a novel about the layers of the human psyche as much as it is about the layers of Arab authority building, and its extraordinary ability to change its outward appearance without anything significant changing in its core. An influential minister, a university professor, and a lawyer—three characters divided, in a divided reality—moving within a twenty-year span from before the Arab revolutions until the moment of the big explosion. Where the influential one masters nothing like violating nations, the university professor masters nothing like harassing his female students, and the lawyer masters nothing like lacking justice for herself! In the background of the picture, the human margin, under siege, appears to be the only one capable of resisting all this with the cunning of the defeated! "The Balcony of the Abyss" is a novel filled with deep dialogues and paradoxes that go far into the details of the prevailing social, political, and economic structure, exposing the shiny outer shell of fragile characters despite their claims of dominance, and a social stratum living on plunder, theft, and corruption. It is a novel of the open space for models that fall upward! And a novel of barter that reimagines "Faust" and his pact with the devil in a more miserable way, in a time when everything was commodified, even beautiful memories and dreams, turning them into commodities sold to quench the thirst of nightmares, a time when nations are violated just as humans are violated. The question of the novel remains ambiguous after finishing reading: Will the ability of Arab regimes to adapt and renew themselves in the era of transformations, which they began at the end of the 1980s, be their own perfected ability after the era of revolutions?! Ibrahim Nasrallah presents a multi-voiced novel, artistically constructed in a way that invites the reader to participate in reconstructing the text, perhaps as part of an attempt to go further, represented in rebuilding life! Author: Ibrahim Nasrallah Pages: 539 Arab Scientific Publishers