Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: The Awakening Story
- 2 Revolutionary Pioneer: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī in Six Stories
- 3 Realism and Space in the First Iraqi Novel
- 4 From Khamsat aṣwāt to al-Markab: ‘Writing about the People of Iraq’
- 5 The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
- 6 Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
- 7 Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- 8 The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: The Awakening Story
- 2 Revolutionary Pioneer: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī in Six Stories
- 3 Realism and Space in the First Iraqi Novel
- 4 From Khamsat aṣwāt to al-Markab: ‘Writing about the People of Iraq’
- 5 The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
- 6 Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
- 7 Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- 8 The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It's not only what's written that's important. You have to read what's not written as well, and that's diferent from reading between the lines, as they say.
Al-Takarlī, al-Masarrāt wa-’l-awjāʿ (1998: 108)Fuʾād al-Takarlī's Joys and Sorrows
Nūrī, Farmān and al-Ṣaqr all refer to the craft of writing in their work. Nūrī reflects on the writer's struggle and fading ability in his story ‘Muʿānāt’ and his short play al-Qādhūrāt. Farmān draws on his own formation as a writer of iction and a journalist in Khamsat aṣwāt (‘Five Voices’). Al-Ṣaqr directly and indirectly draws his readers' attention to storytelling and narrative technique in Imraʾat al-ghāʾib (‘he Missing Person's Wife’).
In this chapter we will investigate how and why Fuʾād al-Takarlī writes about the process of writing in his irst novel Baṣqa fī wajh al-ḥayāt (‘Spitting in the Face of Life’ (henceforth Baṣqa), written in 1948, but not published until 2000), and then more particularly how he writes about writing and reading in a more sceptical and challenging way in al-Masarrāt wa-’l-awjāʿ (‘Joys and Sorrows’, 1998; henceforth Masarrāt) written almost fifty years later. he Egyptian critic Sabry Hafez describes the latter as one of the very few Arabic novels that can stand alongside the classics of world fiction (Hafez 1998a: 10).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Iraqi NovelKey Writers, Key Texts, pp. 194 - 218Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013