وقائع المدينة الغريبة

The novel opens on a disaster: musicians, poets, painters, philosophers, film-makers and storytellers, twenty-two in all, are found dead, and the radio announces that they killed themselves with heroin. The narrator, Nadhir al-Halimi, a history teacher who resigned to write, then tells how the chair of Salah al-Awdaji, a wedding singer, sticks to him in a café, and his feet take root in the floor. Neither the café owner nor the state can free him. The affliction spreads until the whole city is paralysed, the poet's statue gives way to a giant iron man, and the authorities answer with arrests, trials and torture, while clerics declare the city bewitched.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

214 pages in the original

Genres

Satire, Speculative, Politics (assigned by AI)

First published

2000 by Abdeljabbar El Euch

Author's age

40 when first published