05:12 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
(Masrawy):
The Egyptian Lebanese House published the first edition of the new novel by the writer Ammar Ali Hassan, entitled “A Special Need”, and it is located in more than two hundred pages of intermediate pieces.
The protagonist of the novel is a poor, honest supply employee, who lives in a continuous dream, unparalleled in both worlds. He makes a different life for himself in which he bears the same name, but he works as a professor of psychology at Cairo University. The life of this employee in a dream, where he lived comfortably and softly, completely contradicts his miserable real life.
And when the January revolution takes place, the employee hurries to tell his strange dream to the youth, to make living in Egypt conform to his dream, not to his reality. But when he goes back to sleep, he finds his dream gone, so he struggles to get it back. Attempts follow, but they are not far from the security men who follow him. To ensure that people do not pay attention to this strange dream, believe in it, then adopt it, and work to achieve it in living reality.
The hero looks like someone who suffers from schizophrenia, but he is a benign schizophrenia in any case, as he lives a parallel and prosperous life, but it is not in the waking state, as is the case for those who suffer from mental illness whose symptoms are known to be schizophrenia, but it is schizophrenia in a dream, through this strange dream Desirable.
The novel is based on a very different and difficult structure, as the life of its protagonist is divided, and thus its chapters are divided into five times or states (before sleep, cloudiness, sleep, awakening, and post-awakening). At the same time, it appears to be a novel within a novel, as the The hero’s friend begins to write a novel about him when he disappears after the dream is lost, and while writing, of course, he searches for information to satisfy his friend’s personality, so we know through the effort he makes in searching, then writing, more information about the life of this hero.
The cover of the novel reads: “The visions and dreams of sleep differ for every person from one night to the next, except for the hero of this novel, the honest quartermaster, who lives a very strange continuous dream. As soon as he enters into sleep, the dream continues from where it ended the night before. In sleep alone he lives. A comfortable life, while his reality is extremely miserable and miserable in light of poverty, the distress of a greedy wife, and the oppression of the job. When the dream is lost, he begins a journey of searching for it, anxiously on the brink of madness. This hero is not an individual, but rather a symbol for those who aspired to change their harsh conditions, and then woke up to a nightmare.”
From the atmosphere of the novel: “I know very well the streets in which he walked without guidance, telling his dream to passers-by. Some of them would shake him like a fly, and some of them would listen to him for a while, then suck his lips, and let him complete his story on the sidewalks and the walls of the buildings. Few were surprised at what he said, and thought that he was a guardian .
I saw him in recent days, his body was dissolved, his beard grew, his clothes were torn, and he stopped talking about his strange dream, contenting himself with repeating the name of a woman we did not know. Who is this lady whom we realized from his description that she is unparalleled in beauty and kindness? We searched well in his history, but we did not find any trace.
And along the lines of this method, the novel proceeds, which, although it differs in its structure from the various previous novels of Ammar, yet retains his style that relies on Aram’s narration, preserving the poeticness and smoothness of the language, and trying to reach the meaning in the closest way, without excessive gossip, or saturation of the narration, Or drowning in a narrative reproduction on the banks of the central tale that represents the backbone of this literary work.
It is noteworthy that Ammar Ali Hassan is a novelist and thinker who has published thirteen novels, seven collections of short stories, a play, a collection of poetry, a narrative biography, two successive stories, a children’s story, and twenty-six books on culture, political sociology and mysticism, and twenty treatises on his literary works. MA and Ph.D. inside and outside Egypt, many critical studies and articles were written about it, some of his writings were translated into several languages, and she won awards.
