Technical and Thematic Review of Jalal Barjas’s Novel Notebooks of the Bookseller

Abstract

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, all Muslim countries, especially Arab countries, still continue to experience various political, economic and social problems. These problems are handled in various ways by artists and writers. The art of the novel offers the author the opportunity to express the problems in a literary style. Jalal Barjas, who is an aeronautical engineer and editor and journalist in various magazines, is one of the authors who use this art. Barjas wrote a novel called Notebooks of the Bookseller to point out social problems. The work, which won the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is important in terms of shedding light on the social collapse and the psychological problems behind it. In this study, the work named Notebooks of the Bookseller was examined technically in order to determine to what extent the rules of the art of the novel were used, and thematically in order to determine which subjects were discussed. Thus, it was tried to determine to what extent the author used the rules of the art of the novel and which subjects he dealt with. The study is important in terms of revealing the problems experienced by Arab societies today and determining the development of the art of the novel in Arabic literature and the level it has reached. The novel depicts Jordanian society in particular, and Arab societies in general, through the main character named Abraham al-Varrāq, who spent his life away from people reading books because he was suspicious of people, and later became schizophrenic and acts like the hero of the novels he reads about his crimes. In the novel, possible events are also told in addition to a real event such as the fact that the woman whom Abraham al-Varrāq loves turns out to be the wife of his father. For this reason, it is seen that the genre of the work is a social novel. Although there are sections from real life in the novel, the fact that the main character is schizophrenic gave the author the opportunity to present imaginary events and real events in an intricate way. In the novel, first-person narrative was chosen. It is seen that the name of the novel was chosen to keep the reader's interest alive. The year 2015 was chosen for the objective time of the novel and it was continued until 1947 by using the return/expansion technique. Thus, the events between 1947 and 2015, when modernization was experienced intensively, could be described in a literary style. Concrete and closed spaces such as Amman, Madaba, Aqaba, Jabal al-Jofah, Jordan, bookstore kiosk, orphanage, abandoned house and bank are used in the novel. Although the excessive use of words reminding sexuality is considered as a deficiency, it is seen that the author, with the effect of being a poet, constructs his sentences fluently and uses the literary language skillfully in his novel. The chapters end in a way that arouses the reader's curiosity, and until the end of the novel, questions such as why Jādullah committed suicide and who is Abraham's lover are not answered, thus keeping the reader's interest alive. The fact that Abraham, the main character in the novel, is distrustful and asocial to people, lacks freedom of thought; the fact that Leila was brought up in a orphanage, moral collapse; the fact that Nārdā made the wrong decisions in her life, that the people are stuck between tradition and modernity, and that the bookstore kiosk has turned into a drugstore are also symbols of the change in society. The fact that the main character Abraham al-Varrāq is a personality who combines good and evil in himself, steals to do good and commits murder to get the rights of the victims, shows that social problems force people who are good at their core to commit crimes. Looking at the chain of events of the novel, it is seen that themes such as the impact of incorrect education on child psychology, moral collapse, not taking care of orphaned children, bad managers, the public being in a difficult situation and the harm of social media are covered. In the novel, subjects such as death, emigration, loss, suicide, difficulties in life, globalization, poverty, inflation, corruption and grudges between social statuses are mentioned between the lines.