The novel is divided into two parts, two different time periods. In the first, we read the story of Manuel, author of a novel, who is having trouble writing the ending of his book, where the hero Arzal commits suicide.
In this section, we read the diary of Arzal (five days in his life) as written by the novelist Manuel. In this, Arzal is a complicated, eccentric character who spends all his time waiting for a pigeon to appear at the window of his room, and reading his childhood diary, with its tales of his adventures with the six pigeons who disappeared and never returned.
In the second part, the second time period, the character of Arzal rebels against the novelist who has written him and refuses to commit suicide. Arzal claims to be the author, not a mere character on paper, and he decides to write a novel whose hero is Manuel, to expose the latter’s character. In this, Manuel is suffering from the absence of members of his family and writes about them in the form of the homing pigeon in the first section of the book. The book ends with us not knowing who has written who. Who is the writer and who is being written about? Open-ended questions about the characters are left without answers. Is there a novelist? Are we merely characters on paper? Or are we real and is the novelist merely an illusion in our minds?
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- Dar Kalemat/Moulaph Publications Arabic