Engineer Essam is assigned to supervise a tourism project on an archaeological site dating back to the days of the Prophet Solomon. On the land designated for the project, during a routine inspection, Essam discovers a large crack in the ground. He looks at a stone, and when he places his hand on it, it moves and slides inward, revealing an opening that looks like a cavity in the earth. The stone was clean, free of dust, and the picture became clearer: there was writing on it. The young man was stunned. He saw something resembling a rolled-up piece of leather in the cavity. Essam took the leather and opened it... the writing was now clear to him, in Arabic letters! He began to read: In the name of God, "As my king has imprisoned me between the layers of the earth, confined me in one of its cavities, and sealed me with his seal so I cannot escape from within, whoever opens this my prison in my lifetime, I will be his. If it is after my death, he shall have the last thing I own: three wishes."

A few moments later, he felt he was buried underground...! "My God, I've been buried alive!" he started screaming, "Oh God! In the name of God! In the name of God!" Was what happened to him a dream or reality? And what is the story of the child whose face he saw in the tunnel? "He got very close to him, he couldn't avoid him, he stared into his eyes: Baba, he heard him say Baba!..."

Through this absurd and surreal narrative space, Mahmoud Muhammad Al-Habbal practices a great margin of experimentation. The modernity of the discourse is manifested in the writer's dismantling of the traditional concept of a story in the Arab novel. Events are organized in a context of narrative absurdity practiced by the writer within the framework of experimentation, but it is a studied absurdity. It relies on a narrative artistic mix that benefits from the Arab narrative heritage in its folk tales, where surreal imagination prevails and events multiply from one another, and benefits more from modern narrative techniques. Thus, the two goals of literature are achieved: pleasure and benefit.

The novelist says about his work: The novel revolves around a man who is destined to get three wishes granted. Although he doesn't seem convinced of the possibility of the whole thing, he finds himself facing circumstances where he is even afraid to dare to wish. Fantasy and reality intertwine at times or run parallel at others to draw the life and events of the protagonist. Suddenly, he discovers how difficult it is for a person to shape his own destiny, and even more difficult to make a wish when the destinies of his loved ones are intertwined with his own, when life intertwines with death. Then, do we really want to bear the harshness of the destiny we wish for ourselves or bear with our humanity the divine destiny as it is written for us?

• Publishing House: Arab Scientific Publishers/Lebanon
• Author: Mahmoud Muhammad Al-Habbal
• ISBN: 9786140111707
• Number of Pages: 71
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Cover Type: Paperback