Balcony of the Abyss

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

There are losing battles that we fight and are defeated in with a cruelty that our position and circumstances cannot bear, but we fight them again. Every time the abyss opens its balcony for us! With this textual threshold, Ibrahim Nasrallah draws the reader into the text of “The Balcony of the Abyss” and gives him the keys to exploration, to delve into its unknowns, and illuminate its dark areas through a galaxy of intellectual and cultural propositions that will be exploded by the elements of the text during the act of reading. It is a novel about the layers of the human psyche as it is about the layers of the construction of Arab power, and its extraordinary ability to change its appearance, without changing anything noteworthy in its content. An influential minister, a university professor, and a female lawyer: three divided characters, in a divided reality, moving within a time frame that extends twenty years before the Arab revolutions, until the moment of the big explosion. Where the influential person is not as skilled at violating homelands as he is at harassing his female students, and the female lawyer is not as skilled at anything as she is at not achieving justice for herself! In the background of the picture, the human margin, under siege, appears alone capable of resisting all of this with the cunning of the defeated! (The Balcony of the Abyss) is a novel full of deep dialogues and paradoxes that go Far from the details of the prevailing social, political, and economic structure, it exposes the shiny outer shell of fragile characters, despite their claims of power, and a social stratum that lives on plunder, theft, and corruption. It is a novel of open space for models that fall upwards! And a novel of barter that recalls Faust and his deal with the devil in a more miserable way, in a time when everything has been commodified, and even beautiful memories and dreams have been transformed into a commodity sold to quench the thirst of nightmares, a time when homelands are violated as people are. The novel's question remains unanswered after finishing reading it: Will the ability of Arab regimes to adapt and renew themselves in the era of transformations that began in the late 1980s be the same as their masterful ability after the era of revolutions?! Ibrahim Nasrallah presents a novel with multiple voices, artistically composed in a way that invites the reader to contribute to rebuilding the text, perhaps as part of an attempt to go further, represented by rebuilding life! It is worth noting that this novel is on the long list of novels nominated for the international award For the Arabic Novel (Booker Prize 2014)