The Sun of the Eighth Day The Palestinian Comedy

Description

With the inclusion of “The Sun of the Eighth Day” in the “Palestinian Comedy” project, Ibrahim Nasrallah has added a flavor entirely different from anything he has previously presented in the “Comedy” series; indeed, different from anything he has presented in any of his novels.

This short novel unfolds in Palestine in 1900, brimming with a captivating narrative capable of uniting readers of all levels of awareness and ages into a single age: the age of the pure soul in its innocence, the vastness of its essence, and its search for answers that establish meaning and existence with all the meaning, beauty, freedom, and magic inherent in imagination. This is achieved through a sweet inspiration drawn from folklore, which is considered an influx of identity, a fundamental component of the human self, and a luminous part in the process of shaping its unique character and the unique character of the place that embraces and is embraced by this self.

Regarding this story, the writer Ibrahim Nasrallah says: “I heard my grandfather’s tale about his camel more than once from my mother during my childhood. She was proud of it, a personal treasure unlike any other. I recorded it in the early 1990s; it was 498 words long, and I used parts of its events in my novel *Birds of Caution* (1996). It also became the subject of one of the poems in my collection *In the Name of Mother and Son* (1999). When my mother passed away at the end of October 2019, this story was the most present in my mind, as I—like my mother—had become proud of it as a personal treasure. Perhaps what makes me say it’s a personal legacy—even now—is that I had never read it before, despite having read countless books containing folk tales. I had never heard it from anyone, even though I recorded many stories directly from people.

For some reason, I felt that writing this story into a novel was the most beautiful gift I could offer my mother’s soul. But after writing it, I realized that there was something my mother had forgotten to tell us.” Because the story remained unfinished, needing another half, and perhaps she deliberately didn’t tell us the whole story, hoping that one of her children would complete it in their own way, thus creating a new legacy for future generations of the family. And here I am, having done so by writing down what I heard from her and completing the second half, filling in what I felt was missing from a story that seems endless…