The lover

This book contains three unfinished novels. It is as if Ghassan Kanafani wanted his body, shattered by bombs, to write the ending itself. Yet, the ending is never written. With this writer, there are never any endings. There is the search that opens new horizons when every horizon closes. These unfinished novels were only published after Kanafani's martyrdom. And when they were first published in "Palestinian Affairs" magazine, they came as a surprise. The first novel was titled "The Lover," in which the author paints pictures of the struggle's fabric, embodied by Palestinian fighters. From the second novel, titled "The Blind and the Deaf," Kanafani reclaims his symbols, each placed within an astonishing linguistic-poetic structure.

The dialogue between the blind and the deaf, and their shared search for the saint, are indicators full of bewilderment. And when they meet before the shrine, they discover: "It's a mushroom, just a mushroom," then I realized he couldn't hear. I shouted loudly that it was "a mushroom." Thus cries the blind man. As for the deaf man's answer, it is more so. "They also call it truffles," and he fell silent. I will laugh at myself my whole life whenever I remember that I came to ask a truffle for ears to hear with." This novel, had it been completed, might have been Kanafani's most important work. But it remains, incomplete as it is, a rare literary testimony. As for the third novel, titled "April Plums," Kanafani revisits the atmosphere of "Returning to Haifa," but he flips one side of the equation. Abu al-Qassem, who denies the body of his martyred son, is the other face of Saeed S... Three unfinished novels, whose incompleteness presents the grand symbolic image that Kanafani could not write on paper. The image of the writer who, due to his intense attachment to his characters, becomes the main hero in novels he did not write, and the image of the novel, which chooses a fate similar to the fates of its heroes.