Sun of the eighth day

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

By adding "The Eighth Day Sun" to the "Palestinian Comedy" project, Ibrahim Nasrallah has added a flavor completely different from anything he has previously presented in "comedy" novels; indeed, different from anything he has presented in any of his novels. The events of this short novel take place in Palestine in 1948, and it is packed with a narrative charm capable of uniting the souls of readers of all levels of awareness and ages, in a single age; the age of the pure soul in its innocence, the vastness of its essence, and its search for answers that establish the meaning of its existence; with all the meaning, beauty, freedom, and magic of imagination. This is achieved through a sweet inspiration from popular heritage as an importer of identity, an essential component of the human self, and a shining part in the process of shaping its uniqueness and the uniqueness of the place that embraces this self and which it embraces. About this novel, the writer Ibrahim Nasrallah says: “I heard the story of my grandfather and his camel more than once from my mother during my childhood, as she was proud of it as a personal legacy that no one else had a match for. I recorded it in the early nineties of the last century, and it was only one word long. I used parts of its events in the novel “Birds of Caution,” and then it was the subject of one of the poems in the collection “In the Name of Mother and Son.” When my mother passed away at the end of October, this story was the most present for me, as I became, just like my mother, proud of it as a personal legacy. Perhaps what makes me say that it is a personal legacy even now is that I have never read it before. I have read a great many books that include folk tales, and I have not heard it from anyone, even though I have recorded many stories directly from people’s mouths. For some reason, I felt that writing this story, as a novel, was the most beautiful gift I could offer to my mother's soul. But after writing it, I realized that there was something my mother had forgotten to tell us; because the story remained suspended, and even needed another half. Perhaps she had deliberately not told us the whole story, in the hope that one of her sons would complete it in his own way, and thus create a new legacy for those who would come after him from the family members! And here I have done so when I wrote what I heard from her and wrote the second half, completing what I saw was missing from the events of a story that seems to never end.