The pigeon

Author's name: Patrick Zuskind Publisher: Al-Mada for Publishing and Distribution Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: The novel "The Dove" by Patrick Zuskind, translated by Kamiran Hoj, and introduced by Ali Badr, who stated in his introduction: The condition of Zuskind's protagonist, in my opinion, is a kind of existential feeling of helplessness: inability to live, inability to love, and even to reject. But did he find comfort in his safe island in an unsafe world? Whatever our opinion of him, this protagonist did not hate those events that disturb internal balance and disrupt the external order of life, but uncertainty and fear are not on the same level; the cause is not in the home, nor in small things, but in this irrational world. This novel is a symbolic work expressive of self-isolation, or imposed on man, a novel that exposes our helpless lives and depicts how we can simply collapse under the dominance of trivial things, not necessarily great ones. It is a very realistic novel, despite its fictional ending that removes the sad and harsh edge of this work, and there is no better evidence of that than what Zuskind himself said about this work: "I also spend most of my life increasingly in small rooms, and I find it increasingly difficult to leave them. But I hope that one day I will find a very small room, surrounded tightly enough that I can take it with me when I leave." It is known about Zuskind, the author of the famous novel "Perfume," that he is a mysterious person; no one knows, as Badr says in his introduction, where he lives, "No one knows his rituals, no one knows much of what we know about the writers we love, no one knows his goals, his attitudes toward vital issues, his perceptions of his contemporaries' writers, his relationships, or his family."