Human comedy:
By “human comedy,” I mean what I understood while I was still young, crude, and inadequate, namely the absurdity and amusements of human beings. Rather, I go further than Aristotle did in his definition of the word comedy, where he said: (Comedy is what causes laughter, rather than the defect that does not cause pain). As for me, I mean by comedy here, it is immorality, farce, play, contempt, recklessness, confusion, and the chaos of humanity, and there is no laughter in it. For me, comedy does not inspire reverence like the comedy of the Greeks or Dante, and it does not call for laughter like the comedy of Aristotle. Rather, it is a funny, crying comedy because of its contradiction and absurdity, and to those who say that humanity has accomplished a lot, I say that even if there are any notable highlights, achievements, or progress, they are the results of random interactions, scrambles, and quarrels that are unplanned and unplanned, like a gambler who sometimes wins and often loses, but it is an ungrateful gain. Or he should be praised for it, but it did not come from thought or action. Rather, it is absurdity, experimentation, and play.
تجمع رواية "ثمانون عاماً في انتظار الموت"، بين الإثارة والغموض، ونختبر فيها، مشاعر وانفعالات متباينة، . ذلك بعد أن تبدأ مباشرة وبلا مقدمات، فتقحمنا فورا في أحداثها ضمن مدينة الرياض، عارضة قصة "أحمد"، الذي يُعاني من خلل في هرمونات النمو، جعلته عالقاً في جسد شاب يافع لا تبدو عليه آثار السنين.
In the introduction to his first collection of short stories, the Chinese storyteller Lu Xun says that he found himself driven to write because he felt intense loneliness. He was not able to forget, or, rather, he was not able to forget completely; So, he wrote stories about the past.
This is exactly what prompted me to write: overwhelming loneliness. I also failed to forget, so I wrote what remained in my memory about Syria before the war.
Sometimes, exiles write about nostalgia for a country they miss and wish to return to. This is not like the nostalgia of Syrians: the country has completely changed, and even disappeared. We long for a place that does not exist, except in memory. And memory, as you know, writhes, colors, and churns. I am no exception, and my memory does not claim to be completely faithful to reality, but I tried hard to write exactly what you dictated to me.
Hopes, dreams, and losses are all fading quickly, and so is the country, and what remains of it is in us: as if it were a half-smile, or a summer cloud, or a bright comet passing quickly, only to disappear completely moments later, before the eyes of curious, bored viewers, indifferent to its fate...
