Kahlil GibranClassics · Poetry·1883–1931
الأجنحة المتكسرة
Synopsis
The Broken Wings is Kahlil Gibran's early Arabic novella, a lyrical tale of doomed love set in early twentieth-century Beirut. A young man recalls his first, all-consuming love for Selma Karamy, a gentle and intelligent woman whose fate is decided not by her heart but by others.
When Selma is compelled into a marriage of convenience with the nephew of a powerful bishop, the lovers are left to a quiet, sorrowful longing that custom and clerical authority will not allow them to escape. Through their tenderness and their suffering, Gibran mounts a searching critique of arranged marriage, religious power, and the constrained lives of women.
Written in Gibran's characteristically poetic, aphoristic prose, The Broken Wings is a foundational work of modern Arabic literature and an early expression of the spiritual and reformist themes that would later reach the wider world in The Prophet.
How it reads
Prose complexity 4/10
- I don't usually read books in Arabic but this one WRECKED ME
- would you PLEASE appreciate the irony of me writing reviews in ENGLISH about a book I read in ARABIC (My brain is a wonderland of things that make no sense). Anyways, the book. Honestly, I failed at feeling the whole beauty of it, maybe it's because I'm still struggling with appreciating the Arabic language in my readings, it's a bit tedious for me so far. But this book is so poetic, endless metaphors, vivid imagery, and they ''loved with a love that was more than love'' (Poe, always here), and it was pure and platonic, a connection of the souls, something deeply spiritual with kisses on the tips of fingers and barely there hugs, and staring at each other, and inner torment and torture. And the tragedy of doomed lovers while it's their first time being in love (man, s••• hits hard for them). So yeah, cursed lovers trope at its best, if it's your thing (it's not mine, but willing to make the exception for the sake of Khalil Gibran)