Halim Barakat," Six Days", translated by B. Frangieh and S. McGhee (Book Review)

Six Days is a powerful novel about the harrowing experiences permeating the lives of the people of Dayr Albahr, an Arab, probably Palestinian, city under siege for six long and gruesome days by a superior and ruthlessly determined enemy. The novel opens on the first day of the siege, Monday, and closes on the sixth, Saturday, displaying in the process a compact scene of turbulent and contending feelings encompassing the defiant urge to bring about change versus stagnation, honesty versus corruption, commitment versus retreat, love versus deception, torture verse fortitude and life versus death. In this unfolding drama of intense misery and gruesome happenings, the eerie smell of death, and the terrible threat of impending calamity and destruction, seep through the narrative in a punctuated flow of carefully crafted scenes which successfully engage the reader as a keen and active partner in the fate of Dayr Albahr and its inhabitants. Events and moods ebb and flow in this cleverly constructed novel. Nature is not a passive observer in the narrative, but an active player in that it yields a host of symbolic pegs which facilitate the articulation of taboo subjects to be tackled in a subtle but powerful way. An example of this is when the narrator describes the various stages of the love-making scene between Suhail, the chief protagonist, and Nahida who loses her virginity to him: “She suddenly pushes him away. The sun drowns in the sea. The sands cool” (p. 74); “she squirms beneath him as he moves his tongue in her mouth, then withdraws it. The wave retreats, baring the sand, then covers it again with its foam” (p. 76); and “The mast stabs the bare sand. He climbs the peak wildly. Then slowly. They must reach there together. He says, ‘Together, Let’s reach the summit’ ” (p. 76).