Anxious prayer

Novel 353 pages The winning novel of the International Prize for the Arabic Novel (Booker) for the year 2025 A village planted in oblivion, its surface shaken by a mysterious explosion of an unknown body in 1977, suddenly transforming into a tightly sealed box in which every villager lives his own epic: the oppressed rebels seeking freedom and the tyrannical oppressors tightening their grip on souls and necks. But the thread of the narrative only moves backward, shedding light on a harsh decade stretching from the June 1967 defeat to the moment of the explosion and the turning of the villagers' faces into turtles. One event in "Al-Naj' " is narrated by eight different characters, whose stories form a mosaic of the tale, a captivating composition. As for the bottom of the novel, it is a narrative questioning of the defeat and the illusions of sovereignty and victory that followed. Who writes the true history: the boot and the rifle and the chains of iron or the screams of rebellion that do not die? And what does 1977 awaken in us? The death of meaning and art or the absurdity of fate and false peace? Isn't the village of "Al-Manasī" a grand metaphor for a generation of the deformed...