After trying my previous book, “In Defense of Insanity,” it occurred to me to do it again. The issue, in brief, is that I select from things that I have previously published in periodicals or introductions to books, what I consider to be valid beyond their time.
This book is not a continuation of the previous book, but rather a continuation of it.
It contains Lee's opinions on art, culture, journalism, women (and some politics). The question that confronted me in my first book confronts me now: What do these articles have in common?
The answer is as naive as I answered earlier: What unites these articles is that I wrote them.
The opinions here are my own, which may mean nothing to some of them, and may not mean anything to others. But it was important to me, myself, to say these opinions, and to record them, and among them was a farewell to figures like Assi Rahbani and Al-Dhahirah Rahbani, and even a farewell to a number of friends who had passed away, and who had passed through my life only briefly. Perhaps some bitterness still exists here as well. Upon reviewing the articles, I discovered that I was insisting once again on the losses that had befallen our lives. These are losses greater than military or political defeats. It is our constant humanitarian bleeding. And the one who gives us life...or makes us mad.
Beauty Café: A person's life is not devoid of many hardships: the departure of a loved one, the deterioration of health, the loss of money, the loss of a position... but despite all of that, we must continue to move forward, we must be optimistic, smile, and look to the future with eyes full of hope. We must cling to the moments of joy, and bite them with our jaws. Clinging to the moments of joy, from my point of view, is more useful than forgetting sadness. The heart is an open space for all feelings. If it is occupied by joy, it is narrowed by sadness, and if it is occupied by sadness, it is narrowed by joy. What we should be most wary of are moments of depression, as they are the ones that eat away at our lives without stopping, eating, eating, eating until they lead us to disappear. We are not alive because we wake up every morning, breathe, eat, and walk. We are alive for other reasons that are deeper and more closely related to the essence of life. We are alive because the passion is still within us, the passion to explore more in our lives, more that we don't know, but that we know we need.
The novel 'Fragments' is the novel of an Arab generation trying to repair the fragments of history, homeland and dreams to reconstruct the picture so that life is understandable and liveable.
It is the story of a boy, Karmuz, named Imad, who tries to understand the condition of his father, Yazid, who rebelled against life in all its details. A boy decided to put together the remains of his father's pictures and clippings that he had saved from the fire when the father suddenly decided, at the height of despair and revolution, to set fire to his memory during a hot summer.
From the pictures and clippings that saved the boy “Imad,” the events of the novel begin to approach what was, as the pictures turn into a flowing stream of words that sheds light on the past of a man “or a generation, more precisely.”
