A surrealist story by Syrian Kurdish writer Golan Haji, translated by Robin Moger, who provides a useful introduction to the author.
Aboul Nanaat would join us for the sessions where we discussed films we’d never seen. His passion was for book titles, and he knew a vast number of them off by heart. He would finger through catalogue cards in school libraries and the cultural centre’s archives, pore over the Babtain Encyclopaedia of Modern Poetry, skim the listings of new releases in the Lebanese press and issues of The Arab – but I can’t recall him having ever read a book. To him, titles mattered more than content: they were the distillate, the key. What need was there to run flailing into a novel’s ocean of blather, to force down a dense textbook or work of criticism that only pretended to gravity and depth? Why batter through a mountain of paper only to find yourself back where you began, unable to remember a word past its title? To Aboul Nanaat, the only true book – or the only perfect book – was the Quran, because it was memorised word by word.
