The Hand of the Tale

About this book

When a palm opens to narrate, expect no mere story; you have a date with a biography not yet written. This is "The Hand of the Tale" — no ordinary story collection but a map of the soul drawn by writer Abdel Jalil Laamiri with golden fingertips, fingertips that knew how to master the craft of telling. Laamiri comes to us with his second story-telling experience, laden with questions that unsettle boundaries: what separates the writer from his reality? And what is the distance between him and the text he creates? This book is a journey through the roads of the intellectual, social, and cultural transformations of a particular era, a record of an unquiet internal and external movement and struggle. You will find yourself traveling across the great undulations of the palm's rest, following the paths of the five fingers: the little finger, the ring finger, the middle, the index, the thumb. Every finger is a chapter, every chapter carries paradoxes and contradictions and a penetrating critical vision of the world. The writer, who sees in writing "a journey and an act of life and love," does not content himself with narration; he documents, writing on the basis of a reference rich with the richness of a history he lived and a pain he read before he wrote. A story collection shaped like a hand — five fingers, five doors, one palm holding the world.