21/6/2025–|Last update: 01:36 (Mecca time)
Like the mirage that deceives the thirst for days in a barren desert, the word “narration” is engraved on the cover of the text of “a small elephant in a large house” the reader. This trick not only stopped at the front of the front cover, but also in the back cover. The public may ask about the reason for the permanent confusion regarding the classification of work, and what is the importance of this if the work is beautiful? What matters to the reader if the text is a novel or a short or successive story, or even a biography or a jealousy?
Of course, we celebrate as readers and critics with good work and encourage its owner, but in the end, for the novel, as poetry and as the play, characteristics and features that differ from the rest of the literary arts, and presenting a work as a novel and it is in fact otherwise, no less disappointment than you will be a ticket for a movie to be surprised as soon as you enter the exhibition hall that the movie that you promised yourself to see is only a play. Does this reduce the role of the play at the expense of the movie? Of course not, the theater has its fans as the cinema, but why is the papers mix?
Someone says that we are in the time of literary modernity, where the races of literature intersect and the distances between the novel, the story, the play, and even poetry, and this is in fact a crisis that calls us to stand at its threshold and hold ourselves accountable: Who decided to strip literary races from their daughters? What is the value of literature if we mix it with his naps? Who said that creativity means chaos and demolishing hundreds of cash pillars?
The house of Nour Abu Farraj was beautiful, but he closed its windows on the world of the magic novel that we promised the cover of the text: the novel “A Small Eilad in a Big House”, so that the reading of the work begins with the language of paper and accuracy Above the railway of rusty.
The present self .. and absent characters
In short chapters, most of them did not exceed four pages, Nour wrote her story. I allow myself to say her story according to many of the information that we pumped the novel, “If we believe that it is” about the heroine of the work, from its age, study, name, desire to write and other other details that left us bound by the idea that Nour is writing about Nour and Nour from Nour.
The text of Nour begins from the self, passes and ends with it, and here it was the inevitability of the death of any person who might compete in her spoken biography for her tongue. And if the characters are absent from the novel, what remains of it? We may say the plot, which in turn was also missing, the work begins and ends without a thread of a link to the almost absent events, a light moves from one idea to another and from one scene to another like someone who jumps between floating mountains, vibrating violently with every jump because it does not stand on a solid basis.
Speaking of the self, one of the most important characteristics of the successful novel is that the voice of the storytelling is separate from the writer’s voice, and this is what the author did not succeed. The writer’s light was a copy that matches Nour in the book, and this is not a tiredness of the writer if he did not develop her work with a “novel”.
“A small elephant in a large house” is closer to the literature of the nuggets, or the thoughts that many critics consider and I am a kind of writing, but it is not an artistic artistic gender governed by linguistic rules and written architectural structures.
The novel .. Sarid is a narrative of conditions
The crisis of this text is that it lacks the literary artistic transformation, and we say here literary because it includes the novel and other arts of writing such as story and even poetry at times. You read the text and empty it without turning, shock, read with one voice that no other voice is met, no aesthetic distances. You do not read about a personality, but about the writer herself, about her concerns, problems, and psychological internal conflicts, and the society that divided her into two personalities, rejecting and subtle, sincere and false, strong, weak, social and intrigue, so that the war comes and completes this schizophrenia in its fragmented personality.
Let’s mention here our book and the role of our publication that the novel is a literary narrative architecture that has foundations and techniques. Personalities develop, times and places that change, plots and stories that grow, conflicts that are clear, an end that may satisfy you and may disappoint your hopes, and we understand that one of these characteristics is absent from a narration, but its absence is all and the insistence of the publishing house or the writer or an object that is that the work is in force in the category of the novel forcibly, so this falls the work whatever its beauty and depth.
It is obligatory and honest to mention that there is no dust on the language of Noor in this text … which is also not a novelist, but it is a deep language in the meaning, accurate in the description, careful in the expression, sincere with its feelings, and the text is almost free of grammatical and semantic errors, and this matter has become rarely scarce in the Arabic novel during the last two decades.
“A small elephant in a big house” is a beautiful text in terms of ideas offered, the smooth language and the attractive artistic division of seasons, its cover is elegant and its address is smart.
In an interview with the writer Nour Abu Farraj at the Crafts Makers Club for reading through Zoom, the author stated that she was not convinced that her book is a novel. But one of them read the manuscript before it was published and told her it was a novel. This idea is the snow of the chest. At the very least, we find those who share the opinion that this text is not a novel. The most beautiful is that whoever shares this opinion is the author of the work itself.