the secret life of saeed the pessoptimist

Habibi used a comic mode to mitigate the intensity of his world in Israel and to make the story easier for readers to understand. Saeed, the novel's narrator, frequently recounts tragic events related to his family and the plight of Palestinians, but adds in comic flourishes to show his 'optimistic' side. The novel's name comes from merging the Arabic words for pessimist (al-mutasha'im المتشائم) and optimist (al-mutafa'il المتفائل), to describe the narrator Saeed's unique way of viewing the world. Trevor LeGassick and Salma Khadra Jayyusi He died in 1996.The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist Author

In 1990 he received the Al-Quds Prize from the PLO and went on to win the the Israel Prize for Literature two years later. The author’s own anger and sorrow at Palestine’s tragedy and his first hand knowledge of the absurdities of Israeli politics are transmuted into a satirical and unconventional novel.ĮMILE HABIBY was one of Israel’s best-known Arab writers, publishing several highly acclaimed novels and plays. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candour and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain but in a series of tragi-comic episodes he is gradually transformed from a disaster-prone, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian – no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness.

Saeed the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale of aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty typifies the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. ’Ĭombining fact and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, Habiby’s story of a Palestinian who became a citizen of Israel is a contemporary classic – and is widely considered to be the work that founded the Palestinian-Israeli novel as a genre. ‘Highly accomplished … uses a fine mix of Sterne’s ironic and reflexive narrative in Tristram Shanty and the humorous Arabic anecdotal narrative in telling the story of the Palestinians. ‘Shows Palestinians in all their frailty, rather than as idealised political stereotypes. WINNER OF THE ISRAEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

The secret life of saeed the pessoptimist