The lover

This book includes three unfinished novels. It's as if Ghassan Kanafani wanted his bomb-crippled body to write the ending. Yet the ending is never written. With this writer, there are never endings. There is research that opens new horizons when every other horizon closes. These unfinished novels were not published until after Kanafani's martyrdom. When they were first published in the magazine "Palestinian Affairs," they were a surprise. The first novel is titled "The Lover," and in it the author paints pictures of the fabric of struggle embodied by Palestinian fighters. As for the second novel, titled "The Blind and the Deaf," Kanafani reclaims his symbols, a cost he places within an astonishing linguistic-poetic structure.

The dialogue between the blind man and the deaf man, and their joint search for the saint, are indicators full of omens. When they meet in front of the shrine, they discover: “It’s just a mushroom, just a mushroom. Then I realized that he couldn’t hear, so I shouted out loud that it was a mushroom.” This is what the blind man shouts. The deaf man’s answer is more of this. “They also call it ‘popping and squashing.’” I will laugh at myself all my life whenever I remember that I came to ask a popcorn for two ears with which to hear. This novel, if completed, may be the most important of what Kanafani wrote. However, while incomplete, it remains a rare literary testimony. As for the third and moral novel, “April Plums,” Kanafani recaptures the atmosphere of “Returning to Haifa,” but he reverses the equation. Abu al-Qasim, who denies the body of his martyred son, is the other side of Said S... Three incomplete novels that, in their incompleteness, present the grand symbolic image that Kanafani was unable to write on paper. The image of the writer who, because of his intense attachment to his heroes, 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.