enduring story

Kuwaiti writer Taleb Al-Rifai takes us, with an average of two excellent short stories from each collection, through a diverse and amazing narrative journey, spanning a time period of nearly four decades in total. It is as if he is presenting these selections, arranged between the covers of a new selected book, to a hypothetical reader who is different from the one who received the texts the day after their first appearance. It''s as if he - or at least that''s how I imagine him - is suffering from the "Ulysses" syndrome, preoccupied with a magic recipe capable of making the effect eternal, continuing in the taste, ingrained in the conscience, and opposing the vicissitudes of time, to the point that he cried out in public: "Where do I begin my story? And where do I end it?" Anis Al-Rafi''i