The Stationery Seller's Notebooks

Author's name: Jalal Burjis Publisher: Arab Foundation for Studies and Publishing Year of publication: 2021 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: This novel relies on stories narrated through a number of notebooks within a time frame between 1947 and 2019 about people, some of whom lose their homes, others suffering from unknown parentage crisis, and others experiencing a lack of belonging to large families. The fates of the characters intersect, highlighting the value of the home, which carried the symbol of homeland, in exchange for more than one form of destruction. The central character, Waraq, an educated intellectual and an avid reader of novels to the point that any novel's character persuades him and he acts through it, but due to isolation, loneliness, and the harshness he experienced in a noisy world, his psychological state worsens, culminating in schizophrenia so that he lives a conflict between two voices inside him: one inciting him to commit a number of crimes against a reality that did not give him his right to live, and the other standing against him, leaning on deep cognitive knowledge. The novel, in addition to this aspect, reveals during the alternation between the content of the notebooks which will prevail over the other, and how the stories intertwine to lead to a main saying in the novel: that fear will inevitably lead to ruin.