- Khalīl Ṣuwaylīh (1959-, Syria) – Awrāq al-Ḥubb (2008, English trans. Writing Love, 2012) centres on a womanizing, aspiring novelist based in Damascus, Syria. Disliking other people’s novels that focus on history and war, he aims to avoid these topics in his own literature, presenting at times a surreal picture of Syria which is symbolic for the gap between Syrian reality and the intellectual elite (reference). The narrator has a strong relationship to the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whose character names are used to describe the narrator’s own Syrian past (reference). Other than Márquez the novel also refers to the Sufi and Classical Arabic literary tradition (also in O: Occupations, Professions and Hobbies: Writing).
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Anne-Marie McManus. 2014. “The Contemporary Syrian Novel in Translation.” Arab Studies Journal 22(1): 322-333, p. 332, 333