The Bahraini novelist Abdullah Khalifa builds his novel 'The Statues' with a distinguished artistic sense, focusing on the aesthetic parallel between defeat and victory. In its symbolism, defeat is built on a weakened identity, a decline in national sentiment, a regression of values, and existential anxiety. In contrast, victory is founded on pretension, influence, and opportunism. This paradox between victory and defeat becomes a key aesthetic feature of the narrative. The novel explores the symbolic extensions of these concepts, where one can be a consequence of the other, making them intertwined elements expressed through characters like the defeated 'Hassan' and the victorious 'Yassin': “He [Yassin] was advancing on the lit stage... I was in the abyss of darkness,” and “Yassin is my other form, my ghost standing behind me.”

• Publisher: Arab Scientific Publishers, Inc.
• Number of Pages: 184
• Year of Publication: 2007
• ISBN: 9789953871318