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How to get a villa into a matchbox!

Dr. Parween Habib

06 June 2023

A few days ago, during the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, I participated in a dialogue session entitled "The Literary Capsule", a literary initiative launched by the President and Founder of Al Multaqa Salon, Asma Siddiq Al-Mutawa, for the first time in 2016, and it is based on the participant choosing an important book that influenced him, and talking about it in a period not exceeding five actual minutes, in front of the participant, an hourglass was placed on him to count his breath, and teach him to weigh his words with a gold scale.

My participation in the initiative prompted me to reflect on the idea of selection and summarization. I had chosen the novel "Good Morning, Sorrow" by the French writer Françoise Sagan, and I was moved by it the day I first read it, but I am still reviewing my choice, wondering why I did not choose, for example, the novel "Zorba", which still amazes me not to say inspires me? Or another book that left me indelible scars or joy that is renewed whenever I remember it?

The choice is subjective to the moment, so if I were asked now, I would choose another book and tomorrow another. What I previously liked about a subjective criterion changed my view of it after I developed my critical tools, whether by academic study or by participating in juries that require us to deconstruct the text for a more objective judgment.

The choice is easy to summarize, so can we really shorten spring in a bottle of perfume! Summarizing may be useful in scientific and intellectual books, but in creative books, I see it as more offensive to the original text than it improves. The novel, for example, is not only events, but its beauty lies in the details that the style makes first and the aesthetic of the narrative. Therefore, a film adaptation rarely succeeds in being faithful to the text, as it is a new visual writing that shares with the original text the title and some details, and we have rarely seen a novelist who is completely satisfied with bringing his novel to the screen. A novel like Les Misérables with its five parts is how much beauty we miss and a pleasure that escapes us as we limit it to the story of a man who stole a loaf and paid for it all his life. Where is Paris with its alleys and smells and revolution with its purity and excesses? This is not a dispensable detail but a work of art. Therefore, I find myself looking very carefully at the applications and platforms of book summaries, which may be useful to indicate good books that we can miss in the crowd of what is published, but they do not replace in any way reading the book itself.

Without frills, I would say that the abstract idea contained in the abstract usually does not tempt me as much as the dress worn by the author. So that we would not be like the one who asked him to tell them the story of the Prophet Joseph, and he said to them, summarizing the story: "He was lost and they found him!"

The choice is easy to summarize, can we really shorten spring in a bottle of perfume! Summarizing may be useful in scientific books, but in creative I see it as more offensive to the original text than it improves.

@DrParweenHabib1

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