When I finished reading the novel “Dilshad”, the latest work of the Omani woman, Bushra Khalfan, after her first novel, “Al-Baghd”, a question kept in my mind about how a writer who spent most of his experience was busy writing the short story with all the economy and relaxation it required, and then came with this flow and spaciousness when Moving on to write the novel.
But this was not the only advantage of the work issued this year by the Kuwaiti “Takween” publications, which is about 500 pages, as I can say with great confidence that we are facing an original work from its beginning to the last page in it so that I do not say its end, because we will know that all this long travel has not It is only part of the story that will extend through a second part, as the novelist explained at the foot of the last page.
Dilshad laughs when he is happy, when he is sad, when he is troubled, when he is confused, and when the customers deceive him, they do not give him the wages of his porters in the market, and most importantly when he is pinched by the hunger that accompanies him like his shadow and he hardly knows a significant time that has passed without him.
Ostensibly, Khalfan tells about Dilshad, the child who grows up amputated and is thrown by difficult life in many paths, but Dilshad in depth was only the beginning of a long story that reviews the history of Muscat and its neighborhoods and its people, Baluch, Zajal, Logan and Arabs as they fluctuate between hunger and satiation. Then you have no choice but to escape from it. But I did it, and I am now here, on the deck of this boat, and in this great sea, bathed in the blue that I see no other." But this history did not alienate the body of the novel, alienating it from harmony with it. After digesting it, the novelist was able to dissolve it in the layers of the text, so it came in a smooth consistency at the heart of the story and in its internal fabric.
She perfectly plays her narrative games as she passes the story from one character to another, as if we are in front of a relay race in which the character cuts an estimated distance. She carries the story on her shoulders and develops it before handing over the story stick to another character, so that it becomes clear in the end that there are no heroes for this work and that the entire championship goes towards the story only The story of hunger and satiety, and the characters, no matter how large and occupying space, are only tools to achieve this purpose. That is why, perhaps, each reader will come up with his own hero, who will tend to one of the characters of the work, regardless of the size of their presence, deeming them more worthy of attention and attachment to memory.
Dilshad laughs when he is happy, when he is sad, when he is troubled, when he is confused, and when the customers deceive him, they do not give him the wages of his porters in the market, and most importantly when he is pinched by the hunger that accompanies him like his shadow and he hardly knows a significant time that has passed without him. He does not find an explanation for this laughter, so he adapts to it. Then his wife, Nurgihan, becomes infected with laughter before she leaves while giving birth to her newborn, Maryam, who, as soon as she grows up, takes over her father's share of hunger and laughter as well.
It seems remarkable how the writer sculpted her characters, as she was in front of the amputee Dilshad, giving each character a triple name, a residential reference, and sometimes a hometown, as if by doing so she exceeded the features sufficient to draw the characters to the full features. It is the abundance and spaciousness with which I started the article, a great effort that resulted in the great delusion of the credibility of the characters, until once in the middle of reading it occurred to me to search for some of those three names in the Google search engine to see if they were people of flesh and blood. Everything seemed real, it seemed as if Khalfan was recounting a verified biography of certain people, and that what she had done was nothing more than transferring everything that happened from somewhere to these pages. But it is definitely dexterity and nothing else.
The novelist was able to furnish all these intertwined stories, so the place seemed vibrant, as the pages of the city of Muscat buzz with its smells and the sounds of its people and the waves of its sea breaking on the hard rocks.
The geography of the city is full, and it is distributed between an extended coast and difficult heights.
The local dialect is also prepared without confusion in order to show the extent of awareness of writing tools, which led to the creation of a work that is completely the son of its environment and faithful to its necessities. No sentence or behavior has escaped violating the truth of the appropriate place and time for a story taking place in the middle of the last century.
This was helped by Khalfan's awareness of the Omani heritage at that time, so she attended wedding rites, births, funerals, selling in the markets, fishing on boats, evenings of people and distraction away from voyeuristic eyes.
Perhaps what is really remarkable is that the novelist lavished all this skill without ostentation, as she remained throughout the text faithful to the story and submissive to it and with it, without a pretentious showmanship as a way of language or spectator. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .