In Search of Walid Masoud: A Novel

In search of Walid Masoud

Author	Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Language	Arabic
Publication date	1978

In Search of Walid Masoud is a novel by the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, published for the first time in 1978. It was the second book in the list of best 100 Arabic novels.

The content of the novel

The whole novel, which consists of 12 chapters, revolves around Walid Masoud, the rebellious Palestinian who leaves behind a history of struggle against the Zionist occupier in Palestine and is drowning in a net of complicated relationships. Through these relationships, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra shaped a weird picture of the character Walid Masoud, which he made into a legend, touching upon the secrets of his emotional life and childhood in Palestine, and his religious and political positions. The angles in the novel were as many as the number of people in the novel as Walid Masoud is a combination of all the elements of the Arab man who lives his own life intersecting with the details of his time.

Critique

In Search of Walid Masoud carried the features of novelistic modernity in the Arab world, as it is, to this day, unique in its format and is a meeting point between the peculiarities of Arabic writing and the international novel. On the other hand, the novel is considered a shorthand for Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's narrative career. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's novel In Search of Walid Masoud is considered one of the most famous of his work as "The discourse in this novel revolves around the Palestinian Walid Masoud, who announces by his disappearance his symbolic existence and makes those around him look for themselves in searching for him and determine their fates according to this research. Jabra may have exaggerated this little or too much." The discourse in the novel captures the behaviors, values, and social contradictions prevailing in the Baghdadi society, and society is a symbol and a study of the narrative sample of the Arab city society. "In Search of Walid Masoud talks about searching for one's self, and searching for identity, presenting the crisis of place for the Palestinian in his exile and alienation. It explores the personalities and their psychological and intellectual contradictions, and by that painting a picture of the Palestinian intellectual in his loss and suffering.