In “The House of Memories,” we see my heroes, Yasunari Kawabata and Gabriel García Márquez, in their novels “Sleeping Beauties” and “Memories of My Sad Whores,” not only as two images that ‘ shine as memory and imagination, but present as main characters in “Novella” by Mahmoud Choucair, and they come every time as real. It is really an artistic game, but it is more important and necessary to identify and celebrate artistic inspiration that creates a connection with the time of antiquity itself and its brilliance in the indefinable way that, as we found out with the international, Japanese and Colombian writers.
This new novel took me (slightly and temporarily) from the writer’s other novel (and the most important in his entire work) “A Tribute to the Women of the Family,” and it – despite the fact that it is a short novel it was – a lot for me space to consider life as a colored life every time with a different shine that I see in Mahmoud Choucair that affects him… countless “brakes”, the to begin by living under a job, which I once called with conviction “the guardian of beautiful Jerusalem”, then living in the shackles of old age, which did not succeed in tempting him to enter your silence, and he who has been a literary star for fifty years and counting since I read his famous story “The Bread of Others” before I met him one day in 1975 in Berlin, and he was returning from a visit to Finland after his expulsion from Jerusalem, to continue the struggle on the creative and political levels, and to achieve much of what he had achieved for . us in various genres of writing, between the short story, the novel, and children’s literature.
The characters of “The House of Memories” can be seen on both a realistic and symbolic level. For me, I will say that I lived with them as they were true and from reality, and I reserve the right to see them as they were. symbols that point to evidence that has a political presence in our lives, just as it has a profound – and even terrible – impact on our present and future, and more, so I say that these men and women, including the narrator himself,. are a modern version of the image of our Palestinian society in Palestine today, and according to their roles and situation, they carry their passion for life in the way that their general and personal situation gives them , and they are in the “house of memories” moving and playing their roles to the best of their ability and energy Instead, I say that the novelist himself left them full freedom to do so, and he did so to spread his stormy vision to us with a social drama that penetrates. deeply into politics and public affairs, but he does this consciously Perhaps it appears for the first time with such clarity in the new Palestinian novel, which is all… it is traditional due to the presence of people like him in reality. with a deep touch to the level of antiquity in the way never seen before, which digs into the intellectual-political levels as well as literary art which makes the novel discover “its territories time and its place” because appropriately because of a passion for achieving what it is. new and what is able to stimulate the reader’s senses and attract his imagination to participate in the interaction with the novel and its narrative.
Here is a fictional hero that we see as a combination of Zorba’s spirit, his perseverance, and his infinite love for his life, and a Palestinian man who lived a long period of pain and torture of his people against living and living there has been present throughout our novel in a living process that lives between dreaming and waking, but instead between wildness and a desire for adventure and immersion in… Reflecting and recovering from the past as a continuing gift. This is how we understand the presence of love for the first wife who was absent by death, and whose presence in the novel is excellent in restoring in a vital form actions that are composed in the novel co- corresponds to the immortality of the idea of deep love that opens for its owner the doors of life to scenes and other events in which we can see the main differences between the image of Love and images of pleasure: In the houses of pleasure that would be the main -character of the novel often, there are always seductive women who “sleep” or, more precisely, are hypnotized or pretend to be asleep instead of the fast, quick and artificial love, but a the presence also symbolizes passion in life, even from other doors. The human world in the novel “The House of Memories” is also a mixture of contradictions that bring together the simple and ordinary things to the unusual phenomena that have grown like poisonous mushrooms due to circumstances the occupation and persecution and repression. which Palestinian society is open to.
What is special in the novel “Hosting Game” is a Palestinian novel by two international writers, as we said, Kawabata and Marquez They created, with their presence and continuous movement throughout the novel, a creative path who carried a lot of innovation to communicate with the world in a creative way, especially since they created, with their presence as writers and the presence of literature as two specific indicators, a place for awareness of the eternal connection between the novelist and life itself, and I believe that this novel especially opened up to the reader the pages of the book of Palestine, not through wars and the connection with violence, occupation, injustice, and war crimes that continues these days, but also through individual enlightenment on those who are under the oppression of occupations, and enlightenment on themselves and their personal dreams as people. slogans in a turbulent Palestinian and Arab era in which mixed concepts and the influence of “Zhdanovism” almost affected its character on criticism and threatened creativity itself.
“The House of Memories” is a novel that is like a close breath in a desert of flowers whose colors we follow with joy and the scenes we contemplate with much hope. .
