Kite's eye

Author's name: Saleh Al-Hamad

The novel "The Kite's Eye" by Saudi author Saleh Al-Hamad is a novel that is both lengthy and condensed. It takes shelter in the shadows of a three-dimensional world, from which the reader peers through the windows of narrative spaces that alternate, intersect, and intercede: the world of Rusafa, the world of California, and the world of prison, until the moment of execution arrives.

Rusafa is the center of events and the focal point of the extended narrative, possessing favor, influence, and a vast expanse in time and space, length and breadth. It is the city of the hero, Wael, where he was born and raised in the embrace of his immediate and extended family. An imaginary space, yet a real one steeped in locality and documentation. A slowly and deliberately moving photo exhibition, borrowing the latest cinematic directing techniques, where the traditional, conservative Saudi house emerges, speaking with its features and furnishings, fragrant with the scents of its food and fumes, revealing many things to the reader, many of its declared and hidden secrets. The narrative photography is packed with tremendous sensory energy, exploring the corners of the fragmented, destroyed world, with an artistic touch that spares nothing of the hero's world and his interior, without conveying it in multiple colors, the shade of undulating shadows, and the hissing of hoarse voices.

It spares no hearing, sight, smell, taste, or touch. However, the novel is not devoid of a magical touch and a metaphysical tendency. Everything in this world passes under the radiance of dark gazes roaming the rubble of imaginations, nightmares, and shattered visions of the grieving, pained being, arousing pity and astonishment. Then we discover in the hero, Wael, the features of a person obsessed with harming his body, controlled by a strange pathological behavior, which made him record the details of his tragedy by drawing on his skin.

And to transform the sounds of his pain and oppression into a coded symbolic language, we only have to decipher its secrets...

From the eye of the kite emerges the narrator's penetrating gaze into the hidden recesses of the human soul. Wherever it goes, it spreads fire and leaves behind anguish. All you can do about it is pity tinged with bewilderment.