Snowman's Balcony

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

"The Snowman's Balcony" consists of three novels in one novel, each complementing and critiquing the other, delving into its secrets, sometimes denying them, and at other times completing them, as it opens the door to doubt to contemplate the past events. This novel is part of the novel project (Balconies), which Nasrallah inaugurated with the novel "The Balcony of Delirium," which was met with exceptional critical and academic interest. Perhaps the most prominent feature of this project is the high experimental energy with which this writer writes half of it. While the discussion has been long about the relationship between form and content, Nasrallah presents an advanced vision in this field in the issue of considering form as content in itself, and he confirms that there is no such thing as pure truth through this artistic construction that he presents. Thus, form is revealed in this "Arab comedy" as a human act, closely linked to the meaning of freedom in an avant-garde novelistic text that engages in dialogue with the omniscient narrator and questions his absolute knowledge! When "The Balcony of Delirium" was published, one critic wrote: "Ibrahim Misrallah reinvents the literature of the absurd." But what we can also sense is his ability, in this project and his other novels, to offer limitless suggestions in the field of novel structure and to delve into Arab anthropology at this current moment with rare courage and depth. Many Arab novels have dealt with the issue of regimes targeting their opponents, including politicians, intellectuals, and activists in the fields of knowledge and public life. But this novel takes a different direction, contemplating how these regimes have worked to destroy each individual person individually, as if each person were an adversary and an enemy, turning peoples into ineffective, non-belonging amorphous masses, and homelands into mere places emptied of their meaning.