Under the roof of a modest hostel in a poor neighborhood in the Chilean capital, a strange group of guests meets, including workers, trade unionists, students, traffic police, and performance artists. Let them all witness the last days of the rule of the Popular Union headed by Salvador Allende, before the bloody coup led by General Pinochet took place and changed the history of Chile forever. Thus, this hostel turns into something similar to an operations room through which some Chilean leftists try to protect the socialist government and stand up to fascism. And among all of them, Arturo, the braggart and virginal football player, coming from the south to the capital, and burdened with dreams of fame and unsatisfied desires, tries to discover himself and determine his position on everything that is happening around him.
“I Dreamed That the Snow Was Burning” is the first novel by Chilean writer Antonio Scarmeta, and one of his most important works. In it, the features of a special, diverse style are established in terms of rhythms and narrative techniques, in which imagination blends with reality, and in which sarcastic humor alleviates the harshness of dramatic events. The book is a living document of the dialogues, conflicts, and popular mood that prevailed in Chile at the most pivotal moments in its history.
Remembering his childhood, Miguel tells of a wooden statue the size of a man, carved by a musical instrument maker before his death, so the people of Itape decided to place it at the top of the hill, so that it would become a landmark of the village. Massive events and wars take place, and the novel branches out to narrate the events of two decades of Paraguayan history, before returning to that hill with its steadfast statue, which has become very symbolic.
Rua Bastos shows history from the perspective of ordinary people, poignantly depicting their attempts to rebel against authority, revealing the brutality of the ironies of history when these people are forced to kill and die in senseless wars that they fight while standing with the very authority against which they rebel.
Using a linear sequence in narrating the events of his novel, and painting a huge mural about Paraguay, Rua Bastos writes, in a tight plot, his novel, which the great Argentine writer Borges said was one of America’s best novels...
On a small rooftop in one of the neighborhoods of Homs, the Hamimati Nabih Wardan and his birds live a life parallel to what is happening around him in the city, a private, exotic, warm, and pure life, different from the harshness of the chaos, destruction, and displacement events that Homs is experiencing during March 2011. There is a curfew on the entire city, and the birds remain, for a while, enjoying the freedom to fly in a vast sky that knows no restrictions, but even this matter is about to change as soon as the hand of the “khaki-clad ones” extends its hand to the sky as well as to the earth, thus closing Nabih’s crossing to life. Another.
In the novel “The Unfamiliar Passage,” Firas Al-Maasarani explores - in a simple and direct manner - the magical world of Al-Hamimatiya, with its rituals and seductions related to everything related to birds and their breeding, but he goes further than that to take a look at the city of Homs as a whole, and its daily routine before it was swallowed up by the moment of transformation. .
