The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist

by Emile Habiby

Overview

This contemporary classic, the story of a Palestinian who becomes a citizen of Israel, combines fact and fantasy, tragedy and comedy. Saeed is the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale tells of aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty that typify the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candor, and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragicomic episodes, he is gradually transformed from a disaster-haunted, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian—no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness. The author’s own anger and sorrow at Palestine’s tragedy and his acquaintance with the absurdities of Israeli politics (he was once a member of Israel’s parliament himself) are here transmuted into satire both biting and funny. Translated by Anton Shammas into Hebrew, The Secret Life of Saeed won Israel’s foremost Prize for Literature; a stage version played to great acclaim for a decade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566564151
Publisher:	Interlink Publishing Group, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/01/2001
Series:	Emerging Voices Series
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	262,017
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Emile Habiby was one of Israel’s best-known Arab journalists and writers. He has published several highly acclaimed novels and plays and his work has been translated into German, French, and Hebrew. Habiby died in 1998. Salma Khadra Jayyusi is one of the Arab world’s most distinguished literary personalities and is widely known for her poetry and literary criticism. Trevor LeGassick, scholar and professor of Arabic liteature at the University of Michigan, has translated many novels and edited an anthology of modern Arabic prose.

Editorial Reviews

"In Arabic Habiby had no precursors, and has had no successors- acknowledging his debt to Voltaire and Swift, he has proved inimitable."

Middle East Magazine.

A comic antihero's unexpected transformation from wily survivor into principled man of his people is observed with ebullient wit and understated empathy in this famous 1974 novel by Habiby, a Palestinian Arab (1919-98) who lived in Israel and was elected to the Knesset. Habiby's Saeed, close kin to both Voltaire's Candide (as this novel glancingly acknowledges) and Hasek's "Good Soldier Schweik," is a nondescript opportunist who becomes a paid informer for Israeli government officials-until the examples of a courageous namesake and his only son Walaa (a martyred freedom fighter) elevate him beyond his innate cowardice and ignorance. The story is intensely partisan, but it's much more than a polemic, thanks to Habiby's incisive satiric characterizations of true believers and extremists of all persuasions, and especially to an inspired framing device whereby Saeed, having finally escaped the madness of Mideast politics, tells his amazing story from a most unconventional perspective. An entertaining and thought-provoking minor classic.

Kirkus Reviews