“A holiday in the Al-Nour neighborhood”… a narrative that bears witness to history

2024-02-09 21:05:13

Ahmed Atef (Cairo)

In the Nour neighborhood, three people meet who are renting an apartment to spend their vacation. The novel “Vacation in the Nour Neighborhood” weaves the story of their lives and their complex relationships in the upscale neighborhood in a suburb of Tunis, by tracing their mysterious and volatile connections to reveal a new picture of the city and its people.
Thus, the Tunisian novelist Habib Salmi reviews features of the state of his country, pausing for a moment in the heart of the capital, going back in time 10 years, so that his novel, nominated for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2024, monitors the rapid transformations that the country has witnessed in recent years, and reveals the implications of some of these changes. And its effects on people’s souls, exploring its extensions in a society affected by new and different concepts and values.
The writer returns to his country after a long trip in Paris, where he inspects the streets and alleys whose walls are filled with graffiti. In the novel, he points to general, and perhaps sweeping, societal changes in the behavior of different segments of society.
Al-Salmi told Al-Ittihad that the novelist’s talk about reality, and conveying it as it is in his literary works, is of great importance in some periods of time, as the creator must not live in an ivory tower or subjective or imaginary worlds separated from reality, as writings steeped in subjectivity need to Some reality sometimes, and realistic narrative novels are nothing but testimonies to history in a way, and every novelist presents his testimony to reality, time, and events in his own way, and through his point of view, whether he was contemporary with these events from their beginning or returning from abroad to be surprised by new changes, as happened to a hero. The novel and his wife, all of this affects the way the idea is presented within the novel.

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