Jabra I. Jabra," Hunters in a Narrow Street"(Book Review)

Written originally in English, and later ably translated into Arabic by one of the novelist’s students, Jabra’s Hunters in a Narrow Street is his first novel and the only one he has published in a foreign language. This is an important novel because it gives us a foretaste of Jabra’s literary talents as displayed in his later works, for example Al-Safina (‘The Ship’, 1969). It is also important because it provides crisp and, at times, stark descriptions and analyses of a host of issues and values which dominated Arab political, social and literary life in the fifties, as represented by the not untypical Baghdad of that period.