‘She Throws Sparks’ Abdo Khal

DIWANIYA

‘She Throws Sparks’

By Dr. Kamel Farhan Saleh

In his novel “Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles,” - also known as “She Throws Sparks” - that has won the $50,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), the novelist Abdo Khal aligns himself with people living on the margins of society – the simple people.

 Abdo Khal

As in his previous novels, he delves in detail into the lives of poor people including their woes, their problems and the injustices they are subjected to, including the pain they bring on themselves. In his latest work, and for the first time in his novels, he goes further by creating a window into the world of the bourgeoisie.

Khal does not enter the world of prose from an ivory tower, but arrives through the gate of human agony. But he comes to this world much like a man who is surprised to have come across a treasure.

The path of life