So-and-so''s public march

So-and-so Alani''s career in Barcelona - the product of the Egyptian-Lebanese writing workshop"Each of us has two moments of birth: the real moment of birth, which is imposed on us and we do not choose it, and the chosen moment of birth, which we choose of our own free will. Birth may be a job you have always wished for, a woman you have longed for, or even a car you dreamed of owning.I have witnessed and lived with many people who sought in various ways to obtain this moment, the chosen moment of birth, but they died before reaching it. Death preceded the moment of birth, and my goal was not to be one of them.***It is a novel that echoes the picaresque novel, from Don Quixote to Khairy Shalabi and many in between, where the wandering tramp narrator, the visionary narrator who has nothing on his journey except a wooden sword. There is no preference here for one language over another, as classical gives birth to colloquial and vice versa, a world subject to sarcasm that sometimes echoes far from the sarcastic and nihilistic spirit of Albert Kassiri and his bias towards the "vulgar" city hiding under its bright and false facade. Tariq Imam