“The Snowman’s Balcony” consists of three novels, in one novel, each of which completes and criticizes the other, delves into its secrets, sometimes denies it, and at other times completes it, and opens the door of doubt wide to contemplate the events that have passed..
.. This novel comes within the novel project (balconies) that Nasrallah inaugurated with the novel “The Balcony of Delirium”, which was met with exceptional critical and academic interest. Perhaps the most prominent thing that this project carries is the high experimental energy with which this writer writes his text; and if the talk 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 pure truth through this artistic structure that he presents; and thus the form appears in this “Arab farce” as a human act, closely linked to the meaning of freedom in an avant-garde novel text that dialogues with the omniscient narrator and questions his absolute knowledge! When “The Balcony of Delirium” was published, one critic wrote: Ibrahim Nasrallah is reinventing the literature of the absurd once again; but what we can also sense is his ability, in this project and his other novels, to present limitless suggestions in the field of narrative structure and to delve into the world of the Arab person at this current moment with rare courage and depth.
Many Arab novels have been preoccupied with the issue of regimes targeting their opponents, including politicians, intellectuals, and activists in the fields of knowledge and public life, but this novel goes in another direction, contemplating how these regimes have worked to destroy every person individually, as if every person is an opponent and an enemy, which has turned peoples into ineffective, non-belonging gelatinous masses and homelands into mere places emptied of their meanings.
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