by Hassan Daoud
I move between the two windows so that I can see her here and then see her leaving from over there. I know it will not be long before she begins to go out, leaving the home below me empty. Yet I will not stop moving between the two windows, so that I can see her coming when she returns. Then I’ll head to the other window. I know I will go on doing it as long as she is still coming back from these departures of hers.
She will go out, moving her buttocks slowly as she walks, on her arm the little bag that will take her even further away from me. She will empty the entire building for me. I will no longer hear any sounds rising, except for the few I make as I pace among the rooms with their open doors, sounds that will echo ever louder and longer as the house empties of the remaining furniture that waits inside.
“I loved this book when I read it in Arabic. The Penguin’s Song is a classic novel of the Lebanese civil war.”— Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman
“In The Penguin’s Song, a city falls, a father dies, two women walk the same road over and over, a boy with a broken body dreams of love. Like Agota Kristof’s Notebook Trilogy, this spare yet lyrical parable tells us more about exile, loss and the wearing away of hope than most us want to know. I love this beautiful book.” — Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances
“Nothing about reading Hassan Daoud’s novels is easy, but the effort is always rewarded. The complex but mundane beauty of his prose is skillfully rendered in Marilyn Booth’s translation, The Penguin’s Song, a novel as much about the dreary loneliness of daily life as it is about the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Slowly paced, heavy with the burden of waiting, Daoud’s text unfolds painstakingly, page after page. The horror of war, the pain of isolation, the longing of unfulfilled desire, and the power of the printed word all shine through in this finely crafted narrative.” — Michelle Hartman, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University
“Hassan Daoud is one of Lebanon’s most important living writers. In The Penguin’s Song, his prose—lyrical, patient and big-hearted—carefully captures the pleasures and pain of a physically deformed young man as he clumsily comes of age in south Lebanon. With her usual empathy and elegance, veteran translator Marilyn Booth brings out the idiosyncrasies and pathetic charm of this unlikely protagonist in his suffocating world. This is a heartbreaking novel that shines a light with empathy onto small lives lived humbly on the margins.” — Max Weiss, Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University and author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi‘ism and the Making of Modern Lebanon