In this novel, it is as if Khaled is settling his accounts with time, with his lost paradise, with his personal history and the cities whose love hurt him, with the contradictions that gnaw at the human soul and the loss that scatters its spirit, with the alienation of a person from his surroundings and from himself.
All the love, all the bitterness, all the loss, all the orphanhood and the feeling of abandonment are here.
All the destinies and disappointments, all the aborted dreams, all the ruptures that tear apart the soul striving for survival. They are all here.
Here are young people who tried to rise up against their reality with music, but they ended up prisoners of successive disappointments in a city that no longer resembled itself: Yara wanted to fly. Manal wrote poetry despite her brother’s slaps. Anas tried to make a life after Marwa. Sam tried to escape the corruption that swam in the lap of power from which his family derived. And Mariana fled from the furnace of her love to the fire of stability.
In the end, their band failed. And their love stories failed. They failed to reclaim the city.
In the end, they discovered that “the trumpet is not enough to change the world,” and each of them went on to defeat him silently.
The importance of this novel lies in the fact that it is the last written by the famous novelist before his death (2023), and was published a year after his death.
In it, Khaled Khalifa talks about the city of Latakia in Syria, with its streets and alleys, and its landmarks, most of which were distorted by administrative corruption and contractor deals. He mourns the city through the death of the dreams of its youth. They are a group of musicians, poets, and a dancer who tried to breathe life back into a dying city, but they were destined for fatal disappointments. Neither their musical dreams came true, nor their love stories lived, nor did their future lead to the achievements they hoped for. They are defeated youth: Yara ran after her dream of dancing to Canada, where life devoured her and displaced her, and Rony did not keep up with her as a lover should do. He was and remained more depressed than he could defend his life after that. Mariana escaped her burning love for Sam by burning her life. Sam remained torn between the family’s expectations of him and the seizure of some power through favoritism of authority, and between Bob Marley and the life of the vagabonds. Each of the novel’s heroes, the “freaks” as their friend Manal calls them, has his own suffering, his own skinning, and his own disappointment, and each of them has an illusion that swallowed him at the end of the story.
Book information
- ISBN: 9786140603844
- Publisher: Hachette Antoine (2024)
- Original title: Samak mayet yatanaf qoshour al-Laymoun (سمك ميت يتنفس قشور الليمون)
- Original publication date: 2024 (Arabic)
- Order Arabic:
Translations:
| Language | Publisher | Date | Translator | ISBN | Order |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC |
