Sun on a Cloudy Day.

Boullata, Issa J.

Hanna Mina. Bassam Frangieh, Clementina Brown, eds. & trs. Roger Allen, intro. Pueblo, Co. Passeggiata. 1997. xvi + 191 pages. $26 ($14 paper). ISBN 1-57889-045-4 (044-6 paper).

First published in Arabic in 1973, the novel Sun on a Cloudy Day by the Syrian author Hanna Mina (b. 1924) is one of his strongest portrayals of feelings in the context of class conflict intertwined with anticolonial struggle during the French Mandate in Syria. Without naming characters or places, it tells the story of a young Syrian man who rebels against the elite status of his landowning family, aligned with French politics and culture, and who joins ranks with the poor and lowly people of his country, downtrodden by the French and their self-interested Syrian aristocratic lackeys and sycophants like his own father.

Unwilling to associate himself with the Casino, where his family members dance the tango and mingle with the French they consider as their models, the young man seeks out a poor tailor, who teaches him to perform a risky dagger dance. His family members are scandalized, except for his piano-playing cousin, who entertains unrequited feelings of love for him that he meets only with tenderness and pity. His love is reserved for a dark-eyed woman he sees in the crowd assembled to watch him dance and whom he later discovers living in the tailor's basement, which is used as a brothel. When he accidentally wounds his knee with the dagger while dancing frantically, she rushes to help by extracting the dagger, then disappears.

The young man's family is outraged when the dark-eyed woman comes to visit their bedridden son and to return the dagger. She is insulted, slapped, and kicked out, but not before she reveals that the touted fiance of the young man's sister has visited her brothel. The young man is remorseful for not defending the woman and, upon his recovery, tries to reconcile with her. In the meantime, his father pays someone to kill the tailor. The young man is enraged and addresses his father as "assassin," whereupon the father shouts back at him to shut up.

The novel ends at this point, leaving a huge chasm between father and son as well as between those in authority and those unjustly ruled by them. Though eminently ideological, Sun derives its strength from the myths and symbols it utilizes and from its powerful portrayal of feelings, often couched in interior monologue.

The English translation is accurate and fluent, though at times unduly formal. A few errors could have been avoided by careful editing; for example, "Do you think I am a nun, who you can convince to leave the convent?" or "they were tread on with disgust," or "Our forest have grown old." However, the translators have rendered a great service by making this novel available to English readers, because of the literary importance of Hanna Mina, a self-made man who worked as a stevedore, a sailor, a barber, and a journalist, and who spent time in exile and in prison due to his political views but succeeded in writing memorable novels.

Issa J. Boullata McGill University, Montreal