Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad: “The Qareen” and Other Stories
This book is a collection of six amazing stories by Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, one of the leading novelists and short story tellers in Lebanon and the Middle East. The six stories are: My Grandmother’s Creed, The Qareen, The Teacher, The Virgins, The First Bill of Exchange, and Facing Death. The richness and the diversity of the topics is unparalleled, and the overall climate and intensity of the stories is so extensive and compelling that they exhaust you as you continue to flip through the pages, desperately searching for a reprieve, an exit, or an oasis of relief from the suffocating force of the unfolding events. These stories continue to thrash you and draw you in to embrace the characters, or at least some of them, who are trapped in an inferno of black magic, enchantment, and an unwelcome enticement.
Carefully and skillfully, Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad weaves the threads of his stories to construct a world of unpleasant fascination and a universe of purgatorial dimensions, where he chooses to place his characters to encounter their destiny. Their world is a place of marvel and allure, and their destiny is already written and carved in stone.
This realm is quite mysterious, fascinating, and uncommon because it is a combination of many worlds and multiple universes. There, you surrender to fate and suffer through unexpected events. This world has the appeal and attraction of the Arabian Nights, but as you proceed through its labyrinths and uncharted caverns, you meet with the horrific phantom of Edgar Allan Poe, who waves his juju amulets in your face and reminds you of the inevitable fate of his unfortunate characters in “The Fall of the House of Ushers” and the tantalizing song of the “Raven” with its captivating rhyme and unending refrain of “Nevermore.”
Before you can take a breather, you are faced with a host of characters whose function and purpose in this world is multifaceted and complex because they are half-demons and half-saints. These are a special breed of healers and spell-casters, who like the Amazons, were demigods and temptresses. These are the midwives who practice medicine, the fortune tellers who forecast the future, the evil eye dispellers, and the Qareen expellers. These are a group of powerful and influential female healers, who were deemed by some to be saints and by others, to be sinners. They could be kind and loving, but they could also be temptresses and destroyers. Sometimes they offered blessings, and at other times, they would apply a primitive and barbaric treatment under the pretense of removing or dispelling an evil eye or an unwanted demonic double. However, the methods that they followed usually defied modern medicine and infuriated a modern doctor.
However, do not think that you have reached the shores of safety and relief. Your path is still arduous and full of thorns. On every corner lurks a temptation and a mysterious phantom. Look! There sits Dostoevsky among his tortured characters, and here is Kafka in his enigmatic and nightmarish reality with his lonely, perplexed, and constantly threatened characters, and out there is Camus with his nihilistic philosophy and his absurdist works.
The atmosphere is clouded with uncertainty and fear, and the massive and uncertain reality is not of a utopistic world, but rather it is an octopus-like existence that extends its tentacles to suffocate the life of some of those doomed characters. The stories verge on the horrific, and the reader is left to fetch for his own survival. The overall climate is saturated with the blinding turmoil and confusion of realism, the blurriness of surrealism, and the heavy dejection of existentialism, where man is caught between survival and nihilism, and between spirituality and the sacredness of existence and the futility of life and the vanity of living.
Carefully and skillfully, Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad weaves the threads of his stories to construct a world of unpleasant fascination and a universe of purgatorial dimensions, where he chooses to place his characters to encounter their destiny. Their world is a place of marvel and allure, and their destiny is already written and carved in stone.
This realm is quite mysterious, fascinating, and uncommon because it is a combination of many worlds and multiple universes. There, you surrender to fate and suffer through unexpected events. This world has the appeal and attraction of the Arabian Nights, but as you proceed through its labyrinths and uncharted caverns, you meet with the horrific phantom of Edgar Allan Poe, who waves his juju amulets in your face and reminds you of the inevitable fate of his unfortunate characters in “The Fall of the House of Ushers” and the tantalizing song of the “Raven” with its captivating rhyme and unending refrain of “Nevermore.”
Before you can take a breather, you are faced with a host of characters whose function and purpose in this world is multifaceted and complex because they are half-demons and half-saints. These are a special breed of healers and spell-casters, who like the Amazons, were demigods and temptresses. These are the midwives who practice medicine, the fortune tellers who forecast the future, the evil eye dispellers, and the Qareen expellers. These are a group of powerful and influential female healers, who were deemed by some to be saints and by others, to be sinners. They could be kind and loving, but they could also be temptresses and destroyers. Sometimes they offered blessings, and at other times, they would apply a primitive and barbaric treatment under the pretense of removing or dispelling an evil eye or an unwanted demonic double. However, the methods that they followed usually defied modern medicine and infuriated a modern doctor.
However, do not think that you have reached the shores of safety and relief. Your path is still arduous and full of thorns. On every corner lurks a temptation and a mysterious phantom. Look! There sits Dostoevsky among his tortured characters, and here is Kafka in his enigmatic and nightmarish reality with his lonely, perplexed, and constantly threatened characters, and out there is Camus with his nihilistic philosophy and his absurdist works.
The atmosphere is clouded with uncertainty and fear, and the massive and uncertain reality is not of a utopistic world, but rather it is an octopus-like existence that extends its tentacles to suffocate the life of some of those doomed characters. The stories verge on the horrific, and the reader is left to fetch for his own survival. The overall climate is saturated with the blinding turmoil and confusion of realism, the blurriness of surrealism, and the heavy dejection of existentialism, where man is caught between survival and nihilism, and between spirituality and the sacredness of existence and the futility of life and the vanity of living.
