@marwan_zaw And the most interesting part of it is that it rarely comes from a deliberate deception, but otherwise lack of self awareness or a distance between who the person really is and what they aspire to be.
Which are the most humane (empathetic, compassionate) Arab / Middle Eastern novels?
Thought behind the question: I read a bunch of these novels last year -- my selection algorithm was to sample widely among the award-winning works from the region (Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Palestine, Jordan, among others) -- and, overall, I was very struck by the darkness and violence. (Abundant rape, murder, violence, and so forth.)
In trying to figure out why the outlooks are so consistently bleak, I don’t think it’s only a matter of colonialism. For example, The Blind Owl is often ranked as the best novel to come out of Iran, which was never colonized as such, but nonetheless describes an obsessive madman who kills and dismembers his partner. In Season of Migration to the North, the colonizer -- Britain -- is described as being quite benevolent at least at the object level (granting a scholarship to the protagonist; treating him unreasonably justly during his murder trial). Men in the Sun is similarly grim while taking place in a post-colonial Arab world. Even books that are sometimes described as heartwarming (such as Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy) centrally feature rape and female oppression (that Amina is not permitted to leave the home is a core plot issue).
One guess is that it is a function of award selection algorithms: gritty despair is seen as high-status and structurally celebrated.
Another theory would be the period: there are lots of humane novels in the Western canon (Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot…), but those are more likely to be from the nineteenth century, whereas the Arab / Middle Eastern novelistic canon didn’t emerge until the twentieth. I’m not sure this explains it, however. In Search of Lost Time, Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Midnight's Children are all critically-acclaimed 20th century novels, close to the top of almost any list, that one would not describe as macabre.
It’s possible that I just read the wrong books and got unlucky. So: which authors from the region can best be compared to Faulkner, Eliot, Fitzgerald, or Rushdie? (And if they haven't won major awards, does that indicate that the awards have a negative bias?)
@Amid22784749@Bashmohandes أنا حسيت الفترة اللي فاتت قد ايه صعب التمسك بمبدأ diversify and forget وإن الواحد ميتأثرش من كتر التقلبات وبكل الكلام اللي عمال يتقال ويبدأ يعمل panic moves. حاسس هو ده الإختبار الحقيقي.