A review by Mohammad Shweihna for Qannaass, July 10th, 2023
Writing about Khalil Al-Rez’s novel Strawberry-spotted handkerchief provides an important opportunity to discuss a remarkable narrative experiment that has continued to deepen across the writer’s successive works. These works have succeeded in carving out for themselves a newly invented form that resembles nothing but itself, in that it transcends most of what we know of the firmly established traditional frameworks of the classical novel. It is an experiment that seeks to establish something close to a new definition of the novel.
In the novel Strawberry-spotted handkerchief , we live with the hero–narrator a mysterious and eccentric love story that begins with a small paper note from his beloved Raya, bearing a romantic appointment, accompanied by three strawberries placed on a white plate. Raya’s messages to the narrator are repeated, and the two meet secretly through multiple appointments in different places.
The first meeting takes place in a birch forest, where the two lovers are surprised by heavy rain and return to the apartment after touches and kisses. After this, the notes carrying various appointments in many places continue. This form of meeting allows us to imagine the depth of the relationship and the intensity of the bonds of love that united their hearts, such that the narrator does not so much speak directly of passion and intimacy as he turns instead to portraying the rhythm of this love in the form of recurring messages and multiple dates.
Up to this point, the event in Strawberry-spotted handkerchief may appear to be an ordinary love story. However, the novel grows toward depth and the invisible realm of emotions through a strange, uncanny narration that makes use of illogical events, yet persists in consolidating the fundamental viewpoint and the hoped-for aim of the entire narrative process. Khalil Al-Rez strives diligently in his narrative work to establish an approach to storytelling based on excavating the psychological depths, transcending the traditional frameworks of Arab fiction. His fictional work has consistently tended—at its farthest limits—to move away from general topics and major causes, and from the apparent, immediate, and direct treatment of events. Simply put, there is a love story surrounded by a surge of problems, contradictions, and emotional impulses, embodied in the symbol of the strawberry, against the backdrop of a historical moment—the eve of the winds of change that began to sweep across all of Eastern Europe, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The novel, in general, is rich with biographies that expand in circles, intersecting and overlapping: the main protagonist, Raya, Abdul, Sasha, the strawberry, the doll, Nona, Salem… At its core stands, above all, the biography of the first-person narrator protagonist, and what he generates of narratives that make the self their axis, employing their meanings to clarify, through and by them, a specific viewpoint and angle of vision. This delimitation proceeds from the idea that visible, current events cannot be relied upon or taken at face value, because the truths lie elsewhere: in the depths of the singing, emotional soul, in imagination, in illusions and dreams, opening doors to deconstruction and interpretation that quickly close, only for other doors to open, through an event whose importance does not lie in itself but in its expansions, interpretations, and reverberations.
The axis of the narrative process in the novel rests on two basic pillars: the first is the recollection and generation of subjective thoughts and their farthest investment; the second is the reading of the thoughts of others (both living beings and inanimate objects) in a way that accords with the first pillar and strengthens it, allowing the completion of the narrative message. The narrator, speaking in the first person, is the hero, the human being in an absolute, generalized sense; hence he remains without a name throughout the novel, that is, without a defined identity—if we assume that a name is identity. He is the principal axis of events, and through him and within him the focus of narration and its outcomes are confined. We are therefore before a subjective narrative in which events are presented from the angle of the narrator’s vision, who reports and interprets them, and gives them a specific meaning, or directs them according to the guidance of his psychological pulse governed by fear, hesitation, and suspicion.
In tracking the hero’s reverberations of thought and his labor upon his obsessions and impulses, and his constant flight inward, any critical tendency toward the other is avoided, through preoccupation solely with the self and its anxieties, and through a perpetual introspection toward all events, scenes, and persons. Individuality here has no concern with others and their causes, with their hell or their bliss. Hence there emerges a tendency toward abstraction: abstracting dense, successive small events from a mother-event not considered the prime mover and motivator of the growing psychological dramatic action in the novel, to the extent that it is rather this bundle of small events and fragments of extended emotionality, with a chain of subsequent reverberations, that together create this excavation in the depth of the human psyche.
From here, and through a conscious experiment governed by a tight construction, the narrative comes as something different and separate from the traditional system of storytelling based on tale-telling and mere reporting. Uniqueness here arises from this experimentation, which is built on breaking the hierarchy of time, personifying inanimate objects, and narrating the minutiae of feeling. According to this concept, the novel is not so much a narration of events as it is a narration of feelings, thoughts, and reverberations, of perceptions deeply immersed in what is private, individual, and subjective on the one hand, and cultural, lived, and cognitive on the other.
This immersion in depth is supported by a suggestive and highly expressive linguistic structure, through refined vocabulary and strikingly precise and brilliant constructions, reinforced by accompanying artistic images, reaching the point of astonishment at this ability to express and fulfill the tasks of communication far from any artificiality, ornamentation, or excess. Throughout the self-narration that the hero–narrator continually centers upon himself, language is constantly molded to harmonize with the finest thoughts and emotional moments.
Perhaps what is most striking in the novel is the invention of a concept of realism that differs from and departs from all the established constants of the concept, through the hero’s insistence on the narrative proposition that formed the most prominent feature of the novelistic discourse: that visible, superficial, commonly circulated reality is not the true reality, but that there is another reality without boundaries that runs beneath the outer crust, in the depths of the soul, within, in countless forms, generated by each individual in his own way, and according to his value system and culture. Thus we see how the hero–narrator deals with the doll, with virtual journeys on numerous trains toward Raya, and with the handkerchief as a symbol, with all its meanings and connotations throughout history. In parallel, the writer portrays the extent of the disturbance, mirage-like quality, and transformation of this love, in a crucible of passion and attachment, then fear, retreat, and faltering, then a challenge that the hero confronts through other relationships with Natalia and Nona… Buried emotions are pulled between doubt, illusion, solid certainties, and the human being’s will to realize both his dreams and his delusions. Through this newly devised approach to novelistic writing, Khalil Al-Rez charts for himself a style by which he has come to be known, adding to the techniques of writing something unprecedented, through remarkable distinction, with novels whose hallmark is singularity and transcendence.
