المنسي في الحكاية

The debut novel of Tunisian writer Rihan Bouzguenda, المنسي في الحكاية ("The Forgotten One in the Tale") is a metafictional literary puzzle about memory and forgetting. Its narrator is haunted by voices and by the strange curse of being a "forgotten" figure inside an old edition of a book, and becomes consumed by a mystery involving a painter, a child, and a letter.

The novel unfolds as a labyrinth whose doors are the titles of other books: each chapter opens with a quotation drawn from a different novel, and each title leads onward to the next, forming a kind of map in the search for a lost treasure that may or may not exist. Driven to understand what he has forgotten, the narrator resolves to travel to the city where everything began and ended, accepting that some fates cannot be escaped.

Written by a scholar of Arabic language and literature, it is a reflective, allusive work preoccupied with absence, identity, and the fragile line between remembering and being erased.