The traitorous translator

In this novel, the suffering of the Arab writer in general, and the novelist in particular, appears prominently. It reveals the suffering of the writer as a human being, as an Arab citizen, with political and social events playing a fundamental role in his work, whether poetry or prose, with a particular focus on the novelist and his work that takes him into worlds where he becomes lost between reality and imagination, fleeing from a life he perceives as destructive; Arab political crises. A society living under slogans, and intellectuals burdened by unproductive ideas and principles. The novelist in this work, through a wonderful style, blends the political events that cast their heavy shadow over Arab countries: the invasion of Iraq, the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the crises that accompanied it, and the shifting balance of power worldwide. The novelist combines all of this with the course of the narrative events among his characters, using it to express the crisis of homeland and citizen... The novel contained lessons in the art of translation and criticism, and even the art of the novel itself, as much as it contained a clear resentment from the narrator towards the cultural environment of the novel's geography. Elaph... This is the first time in my life I read a literary work that confronts literature from the inside, from within the house, from its corridors, corners, and dark rooms, from behind its curtains, its safes, and its vaults... tearing its curtains, exposing it before its own self, its narcissisms, and pretensions, before exposing it to others. It addresses the diseases of intellectuals and the secret literary world always cloaked in the nobility of the message and the purity of the goal. Fahad Al-Salman, Al Riyadh Newspaper... Nominated for the Translator Traitor novel for the International Booker Prize (shortlist) in 2009 and for the German Rokert Prize in 2013 for the novel God's Soldiers.