رواية الحب في المنفى - بدون نت

The novel “Love in Exile” by the novelist Baha Taher is one of the distinguishing marks in his literary career, and was ranked among the list of the best hundred Arab novels, and critic Dr. Shukri Ayyad said that it is a “new model for the realistic novel,” and it represents the stage of alienation that Baha Taher lived through after his dismissal from His work on the Egyptian radio in the mid-seventies of the last century. He headed to Geneva, Switzerland; That is why we can say that Tahir’s feelings of exile are embodied in this novel, in which the reader will find different and contradictory feelings between love, separation, treachery, betrayal and brilliantly written historical events.

The novel takes place in the early eighties of the last century, the time of the Israeli invasion of Beirut and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, and at the same time: the bias of the West towards Israel and its terrible oppressive practices. Taher was able to combine his fictional novel with some real facts and events, such as real testimonies about these massacres that the Western world turned a blind eye to and the Arabs' inability to move to expel the Zionists. The novel also limped into the violation of human rights in South America, specifically in Chile. In general, we can say that the novel moves in a political space through its various characters, and it talks about a generation that failed to achieve its dreams, feeling alienated and alienated from itself and its homeland.

In the novel, and with literary skill, Bahaa Taher managed to intertwine the internal conflict in the hearts of his heroes and make the reader share this burning conflict with them. As it forces the reader to be vigilant and to answer by himself many of the questions posed by its writer in this painful novel. The novel came as a mixture of the narrator’s narration and revelation, whose presence we find prevalent in the novel because of a common psychological denominator between the characters, which is the feeling of alienation; She reveals her disappointments, failures, frustrations and inability. As well as the recalls, which are a kind of nostalgia for the homeland, and appear especially in the literature of alienation.

“Love in Exile” belongs to the literature of alienation, the narrator in it came through the speaker’s pronoun “I”, represented by the main character in the novel. He is the narrator, representing the Nasser era with all its positives and negatives, and he sees that after the departure of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, things have changed. This heroic narrator, whose name Bahaa Taher did not reveal throughout the novel, is a Nasserist “Cairo” journalist who lives on the ruins of Nasser’s rule and is loyal to him. He is a central character and represents a person who lost what he owned and never found what he wanted. The events of the novel escalate and its characters intertwine and reach an unexpected sad and painful end.

In his novel, Baha Taher was able to borrow many forms from the techniques of the novelistic form, so he divided the novel into eleven chapters; The longest are the sixth and eleventh chapters, and each chapter takes a separate title, and with the presence of these sub-headings - which apparently refer to the independence of the narrative units - in the chapters; However, the other narrative elements extend within all the units without interruption, indicating the unity of the text as an integrated structure.

The protagonist lives a dispersed life. At first, his relationship with his wife collapsed, coinciding with the end of Abdel Nasser's rule. He loses his family after he separates from his wife, and his two sons decide to live with the mother. The other blow also comes to him as a result of his political inclinations loyal to Abdel Nasser, and therefore it was necessary to get rid of him after the revolution of correction, so he is exiled outside Egypt to one of the European countries, whose name Bahaa Taher did not mention, but we understand from the context of events that he is “Switzerland”, in order to work as a reporter for his newspaper In Cairo, which no longer publishes anything.

In exile, he gets to know Brigitte, the Austrian tour guide who is exiled to Switzerland, to escape from the past that surrounds her in her original homeland, and a love affair develops between the two; The hero considers it the lifeline with which he escapes from the politics that distracted him and his lowliness after he reached the middle of his fiftieth year. Here, Taher refers to the relationship of the East with the West; However, the pain inside him expands with Brigitte's parting with him at the end of the novel.

The novel refers us to the causes of an internal struggle experienced by the majority of Arab societies, following the disappointments and setbacks in the middle of the last century and beyond, as if the hero is the embodiment of all of us as he asks about: his hopes.. his dreams.. and his future. And about beauty and salvation from the bondage of aggression, abuse and Israeli violations against the Arab nation, and is this what will be the fate of future generations after us?

The place in the novel is just an area, as Bahaa Taher did not mention his name; This is as evidence that exile is exile and alienation is a loss, so it does not matter whether this place is Switzerland or any other place, but rather it is just a place on which the defeated lives and struggles with life, trying with his remaining energy to live.

An enjoyable read, we wish you.