The Perception of Meaning. By Hisham Bustani; translated from the Arabic by Thoraya el-Rayyes. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 235. ISBN: 978081560595.
Hisham Bustani, the author of these seventy-eight fiction pieces, is a Jordanian writer who is famous in Arabic literature for his contemporary style and the surreal view he gives to his works.
This book is a bilingual edition with parallel Arabic and English translation on pages facing each other. It is translated by Thoraya el-Rayyes, a Palestinian-Canadian translator and writer who has also translated Bustani’s story “Skybar.”
This work of fiction was the co-winner of the 2014 King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award at the University of Arkansas. Bustani has used names, places, and incidents throughout this book which are either fictitious or, if real, have been used to give a certain meaning to the stories. These includes famous figures or characters such as Mark Zuckerberg (founder of FaceBook), Nazim Hekmat (Turkish writer and poet), Muhammad Nasrallah (Jordanian plastic artist), Skybar (an open-air bar and night-club in Lebanon), and the Canary(an old hotel in Amman).
Bustani’s literary work is a reflection of his creative imagination that mixes the realities of today’s life with the dramatic changes resulting from technologies invented and controlled by humankind, such as televisions, phones, computers, and the internet. The author’s tone in this collection is sarcastic and sharp yet supportive and sympathetic. The book consists of twelve parts and each of these consists of different forms and genres, including but not limited to fairy tales, legends, myths, news, poetry, Facebook posts, and images from YouTube. Following are some pieces from different parts of the work.
The first part of the book is called “Apocalypse Now”; it covers almost half of the book’s content with topics such as destroying nature, suffering and pain caused by violence and injustice, current news, social networks, the internet, people, world political and social issues, etc.
Destroying nature:
…When man climbed the tree to meet his ancestors, all the leaves fell and species vanished. No color but washed-out grey, and no sound but the breaking of branches in his clumsy hands. Before a full white moon, he sat on one of the branches and began to cry. (p. 9)
… Behold the flowers sprawled out over the fields:
White, red, yellow, lavender.
How naive,
They do not know the concrete is coming. (p. 21)
Or, in another part:
The sea is a mirage filled with water,” said Taher Riyadh.
And so
Man dried out the sea
to search
for
the mirage. (p. 131)
Suffering and pain:
The peasant, whose petrol-soaked clothes caught a spark, dissolved immediately into the soil in a flare of celebration.
india tadalafil online The four chambered heart in human beings is a rather recent development in the history of healing. Beside that, millions men and women endure concealed pancreatic insufficiency with digestive complications like gas, bloating, buy cialis viagra indigestion, constipation or diarrhea, fatty food intolerance, etc. Pioglitazone is sold under the trade name of Actos in drug market. female viagra online levitra tablet These low levels can also decrease the sex drive in women is even more common than in men. Part of him became flowers, part of him became migrating birds. Only his heart went on pulsing within the earth, leaving behind seisms and volcanoes. (p. 13)
On the bed of the poor hospital, he crumbled without a single person to his side and disappeared into forgetting. (p. 41)
In the part entitled “Leila and the Wolf,” Bustani has used the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale to show that in today’s life, there is nothing left from those innocent tales and fables but only sex and violence. He also captures the same story as porn images on YouTube:
“The Grandmother and the Wolf /Warning: you must be over 18 to watch this video.” (p. 57)
…Leila hadn’t been going to visit the grandmother that day, she’d had a date with a client.
The wolf hadn’t been hungry that day.
The grandmother hadn’t been ill.
The hunter hadn’t been.
All there is to it is that a child threw his storybook in the trash, and walked out of the library into the street. (p. 61)
In the part entitled “This Deluge of Emotion Is Going to Make Me Vomit,” the author is questioning the truthfulness of emotions in relationships compared to communications using emoji in texts messages, emails, or via social networks, showing how much communication styles have changed:
Love, hugs, kisses, then … Enter.
Everything dissolves into digital language: 0 1, 0 1, and bodies evaporate to become shapes on a screen.
… How will I know if the flood of kisses that my darling engulfs me in every day is different from the kisses at the end of every sentence she sends to whomever leaves a line of nonsense on her wall?
How will I know if the kisses at the end of every sentence she sends to whomever leaves a line of nonsense on her wall are different from the kisses she gives me? How do I know that they aren’t a prelude to kisses like the ones she gives me? How will I know if my kisses are really kisses and not a long line of the letter x? (p. 171)
And last, in the final section called “Salvation,” Bustani writes about real life kneaded with imagination and wryly shows the effect of media and news on our lives:
Whenever he fell ill with optimism,
He swallowed the news broadcast twice a day,
And wrapped himself up in newspapers before going to sleep.
He dreams of the end, and is cured. (p. 225)
This bilingual edition is professionally translated in collaboration with the author and with his approval with a few minor edits from the original language in order to preserve the musicality of some of the pieces (p. vii).
To sum up, this work has a mix of prose and modern poetry unique in Arabic fiction. It is an appropriate source for any academic or literary reading with a focus on the Arabic language and its literature.
Shahrzad Khosrowpour
Chapman University