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).