In Search of Walid Masoud
A Novel

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (Author), Roger Allen (Translated by), Adnan Haydar (Translated by)

9780815604587

Paperback / softback, published 15 September 2024

302 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.433 kg

Beautifully fashioned, unusual, and richly satisfying." - Kirkus Reviews

"Jabra's characters, like Simone de Beauvoir's set in Paris, or New York intellectuals of the 1950s, thrive on brilliant rationalizations of their own narcissism, while the humanism they affect is doomed to political impotence." - Publishers Weekly

"The perspective this novel offers not only on the problem of Palestine but also on the Arab world is a revelation." - Booklist

Walid Masoud disappears. A Palestinian intellectual, he has been living in Baghdad since the first Israeli War of 1948. As a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel, suspicion arises that he has gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of garbled utterances through which Jabra Ibrahim Jabra artfully crafts the basis for the narration. He transforms the transcription of the tape by each of Masoud’s comrades into a study of character. Through a series of monologues, each becomes a narrator of his own experience.

Readers of The Ship (also translated by Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen) will remember the ingenious way the political themes emerge through the dialogue between passengers on a ship crossing the Mediterranean from the Arab to the European world. This novel echoes identical subjects: the misperceptions between Western and Islamic cultures, personal landscape as a shaper of culture, and the necessity of political commitment.

A tour de force that places the evolution of the Faulknerian style into a political register, this book is a testament to the brilliance of one of Palestine’s preeminent writers.