Kai Nagase reviews “Planet of Clay” (The blue pen) by Samar Yazbek for Shukan Kinyobi, on July 19th, 2024
Below is an excerpt from the critic’s blog.
Samar Yazbek is a writer who is well aware of how difficult it is to talk about and portray a complex world, but has never fallen into the depths of despair or resignation and has instead searched for words that are in harmony with reality. I was blown away when I read this novelist’s non-fiction narrative, “The Crossing” This novelist reconstructs the reality of Syria as a story, vividly depicting the devastation and the people living there, and I thought that she might be someone the world needs in the future.
How do we write about a world we don’t understand? How do we convey scenes that cannot be shown in a conventional story? Samar Yazbek has been pondering these questions for a long time, and in this book she entrusts the search for the answers to one young girl.
The story is set in Syria in 2013. In this country where civil war continues, government forces are besieging the country in many places. The girl is also trapped in this blockaded situation.
In fact, this girl has one unusual physical characteristic. She cannot stop walking. Her legs keep moving against her will, and she lives tied to her mother and brother by a string. This novel depicts in two or three ways the sense of suffocation that she feels as she lives in this absurd world.
In the review, I wrote the following:
The artist portrays the triple oppression suffered by the girl, an individual pushed outside the realm of normalcy, a woman, and a Syrian citizen, from society and the state, thereby asserting that the freedom that modern society supposedly achieved is not in the hands of the people of Syria, and modulating the resolution with which we view the world.
So how did the author portray that oppression? For more details, please read the book review and the novel itself.
The translator Ayumi Yanagida, who is actively translating Middle Eastern literature, also has an interesting story to tell, so if you read the interview below, you will gain a much deeper understanding of this work.