Key Shadows

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

In the novel "Shadows of the Keys" by the poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah, the Palestinian person appears as a mythical image of his memory, just as his memory appears as an image of the meaning of his existence. A novel that transcends many eras and major transformations witnessed by Palestine, and experienced by the characters in this work, extending to the farthest limits of the idea of ​​existence, diaspora, and identification with a homeland that was forcibly taken away. It is also about the distance between the humanity of the right-holder and the arrogance of the denier of this right, which is embodied here through an exceptional confrontation between a Palestinian woman and a Zionist officer. This relatively short novel proves that epics do not always need many pages to deserve their name. In “Shadows of the Keys,” another powerful, moving, and stormy epic emerges, due to the extreme intensity of the conflict that Palestine has experienced and continues to experience in confronting its occupiers. About Palestine, love, art, photography, singing, music, and human heroism, comes “The Bells Trilogy,” the epic work of the poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah, winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Booker Prize) in 2018, to form what we can describe as a novel of novels, connected and separate at the same time, so that the reader can read any one of them as an independent work, or read the entire trilogy as a multifaceted, integrated work, for a single story, which is the story of Palestine during the twentieth century. The twenties. This epic work, which is an extension of (The Palestinian Farce), embraces the broader novel project “The Bells Trilogy,” which includes three novels: (Shadows of the Keys), (The Biography of an Eye), and (Tank Under the Christmas Tree), and with it Ibrahim Nasrallah confirms a superior ability to renew, give, and explore new areas, historically and humanly.