The Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih has been described as the "genius of the up to date Arabic novel." He has dwelled overseas for most of his life, yet his fiction is solidly fixed in the town in which he spent his early years. His most well-known work is the up to date classic Mawsim al-hijra ila'l-shamal (1967; Season of Migration to the North), which obtained large critical vigilance and conveyed new vitality to the Arab novel.
Tayeb Salih's large innovative is a convincing satirical rewrite of Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness. In Salih's version, instead of a European thoughtful journeying to Africa to be corrupted by his communicate with "primitive savagery," the protagonist starts out as an idealistic juvenile man from Sudan who travels northward to Europe, where he is altered by corruption, decadence, and the mutual destructiveness of sad love affairs. The innovative is cleverly in writing and well translated, with terrific insights into the relationships of southern and to the north hemispheres; the colonized to their colonizers; Arabs and Europeans; and men and women. I've read many of Arab novels (and numerous more African ones)
Postcolonial and more than a little postmodern, this short innovative tells a story inside a story and goes through a kind of distinct styles of storytelling, representing a variety of perspectives on being African in an Africa both compelled in custom and transformed by the leverage of Europe. Born of both worlds, the North and the South, the innovative calls to brain Joseph Conrad from its first words, its unnamed narrator speaking to an unseen assembly of "gentlemen." And that is only the starting of numerous ironies, as the innovative interweaves mystery, melodrama, travelogue, bawdy wit, politics, sociology, history, topography, Faustian tale, confession, and some very racy material that comes close to being untainted potboiler.
Set in Arab Sudan in the mid-20th 100 years, the publication can be read for any of several themes: the exoticism of Africa in the European fantasy, the subjugation of women, the peril in the triumph of reason over compassion, the adversity of working out reality in a world of secrecy and lies, the transformation of tribal town life with the introduction of foreign ideas and expertise, and so on. Like the work of publications that it is, the publication can be read more than one time for its richly convoluted layers of significance, where literal and figurative trade places at will. The knife-like for demonstration of a dangerously superior intellect, for demonstration, reappears subsequent in the innovative as a killing tool for fighting - not one time but twice. Earns a location on any shelf of 20th-century world literature.
Tayeb Salih asserts the complexity of both Eastern and Western cultures by showing how characters who proceed between them have experiences that withstand even physical stability. The book's aggression, disappointments, and misunderstandings happen when these characters drop back on clichés, if it's Mustafa ...