The Scoundrels Laugh

Abdo Khal, the well-known Saudi writer and journalist, exposes the daily reality of the characters in his short stories, delving into the depths of their fragmented selves through the mirror of language and the precise description of characters who differ in the way they see life, others, and their goals in general. In “The Scoundrels Laugh,” the novelist accurately depicts models of people and social classes that are different in awareness and perception from their peers due to the environment or social milieu to which they belong. Some of them believe in magic, some believe in fate, and some wander far away with their dreams without achieving anything. In “The Scoundrels Laugh,” for example, the narrator describes the situation of a prisoner who drew a ship on the prison wall and called on his friends to escape through it out of the cell. This story indicates what the human soul suffers from when it loses freedom and experiences inhibiting emotions, chaos, disorder, and imbalance in its relationship with others. Thus, we find that the rest of the stories came in form and content expressing a deep human dimension through which the writer tried to reveal what these relationships leave of wounds and perhaps distortions in the structure of the human spirit of the oppressed characters in his stories, for whom he drew a world of their own that they live in isolation from what is happening behind bars, until writing seemed to Abdo Khal a style and subject that travels and contemplates itself, and is born each time a new birth that produces a new story.