Writing Love by Khalil Sweileh

My latest review is of Writing Love by Khalil Sweileh in The National. The book is an interesting entry into the hybrid novel genre of writing, but ultimately it didn’t stand up for me.

At a time when hybrid genres are all the rage in the art world, literature has seen the emergence of a particularly powerful variant that might be called “the novel as essay”. Its godfathers are two Frenchmen named Jacques – Lacan and Derrida – who turned their lectures into omnivorous forms that devoured all manner of texts and who used healthy doses of irony and absurdity to create public personae. As with the work of the two Jacques, the novels in this emergent genre delight in pastiche, appropriation, the elevation of inquiry over answers, and the construction of authorial doppelgängers.

Writing Love, the first of the acclaimed Syrian novelist Khalil Sweileh’s books to be translated into English, is a worthy entrant into this genre. The book is a loose chronicle of an unnamed narrator’s attempt to write a novel very much like the one we are reading. It is intended to be a love story, albeit an unconventional one: a bricolage of foundational texts (Borges, Alberto Manguel, the Arabic writer Al Jahiz, Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera are all name-checked in the book’s first pages), ongoing love affairs in his own life, contemporary Syria, and his own fleeting memories. The highly diffuse, meandering plot consists of the twists and turns of the narrator’s relationship with two women he’s pursuing, his novelistic aspirations, and his many random asides.

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