Ali

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?)

یه کاربری چند سال پیش اینجا نوشته بود، مادربزرگش بلد نیست توی اینستاگرام پست‌ها رو ذخیره کنه و برای اینکه دستور آشپزی‌های موردعلاقه‌اش رو بتونه پیدا کنه همه رو می‌فرسته به دایرکت رضا پهلوی. الان که اینترنت قطع شده مادربزرگ اون کاربر لابد غصه می‌خوره.

صدی نود پسرایی که از این حرفا میزنن و طرفدارن اینن که "بِستیشون" دختره و اگه دختری کلی دوست پسر داشته باشه یا بهترین دوستش پسر باشه هیچ عیبی نداره و خیلی عادیه، آدمایین که هیچ شانس خاصی در مارکت دیتینگ ندارن، یا فکر میکنن ندارن، و تنها راه رسیدنشون به سکس رو در قالب این روابط اکیپی کسشر میبینن. پ‌ن: دختری که دوست صمیمی پسر داره تا ابد کنسله.