In the last decades of the twentieth century, the autobiographical novel took center stage, gaining significant importance. Its richness and fertility presented it as a form of self-examination, review, and questioning. "The Windmills and I" is a novel by the Jordanian director and writer Abbas Arnaout. As the reader examines it, they will notice its connection to the autobiographical novel, as its events and characters intersect with unmistakable elements from the writer's life.

Initially, we find a genre marker in "The Windmills and I"—the word 'novel' accompanying the title, directing the reader from the outset to receive it as such. However, a reader familiar with the writer's life and art finds themselves before texts where the writer, narrator, and character are not without overlap. Thus, the autobiography reveals itself, being written in the first-person singular "I," which melds the narrator, character, and writer into one crucible—in other words, into a single, unified memory. So, what did Abbas Arnaout want to tell us in these windmills of his?

The writer says within his work: 'I believe that art is a message and that our actions are our words walking on the earth, and work must match thought. If someone were to ask me in what era I lived, I would say I lived in the era of Abdel Nasser. I believed and learned that the nation is one, not divided by borders, and that our language is one of the factors of our unity... Colonialism tried to promote local dialects to turn the language into languages and the nation into peoples. When we gathered in the West as students from different countries, language united us; through it, we got to know and understand each other. Therefore, my first duty is to preserve the Arabic language, and I decided that my works would be in classical Arabic, uniting the nation, not dividing it.'

This is Abbas Arnaout, writing about life, death, art, freedom, and justice. '...I wish I were Che Guevara fighting for justice... or Buddha searching for happiness for others. I want to write the end... This is a book about life and the end of life. We all know the end... and we all are ignorant of it... One day I wrote a story titled "It Is Happening Now"... and what is happening now is the end, or perhaps the beginning of a following tale.'

Year of Publication: 2012