Hassan Daoud's 'The Penguin's Song' Sees Abandoned Buildings as Metaphor for Lebanon

 

By Daoud. Hassan, translated by Marilyn Booth

City Light Books, 2014

 

Readers who like to keep an organized library may want to order two copies of Hassan Daoud’s novel, “Penguin’s Song.” The first copy can go next to the other Lebanese war novels which display the vibrant cultural production of contemporary Lebanon, while the second copy can occupy a place next to Knut Hamsun’s,“Mysteries” and Melville’s,“Bartleby the Scribner,” two narratives that also creatively employ abnormalities to reflect on the distortions of ‘normality.’

 

Admirers of Daoud will recognize his motif of the elderly male awaiting death, isolated despite the proximity of family members, as well as the writer’s use of a disintegrating apartment building as a metaphor for Lebanon. While unmistakably Beirut, Daoud’s city, with its balcony life, curved streets, repetitive shops and civilian displacement, features a narrative that transcends physical boundaries and identities to become a universal metaphor for modernity. In “Penguin’s Song,”set in the urban outskirts, the characters must walk along a sandy road to enter a building “rising on the knoll like a short, fat tower.” Once there, they discover that the back of the edifice faces even more sand that drops off into a void.

 

Daoud’s startling coming-of-age protagonist, who, the reader eventually will discover, is shaped like a penguin. The young man lives with his parents and reminisces about sitting in his father’s shop reading while the agile man attends to both his son and his customers. But this shop and paternal vitality belong to the past. Now, as the father’s eyesight continues to deteriorate, he irritates his son and wife by repeatedlyasking if they can see his old store from the balcony. As they look away or mock him, the man insists “that [they]are actually seeing his shop, even… as far away as this, he can let himself believe that someone else sees the same image.” While the father gazes into the ever growing distance of his memories, the mother concentrates on her tiny stitches of embroidery. Yet time will not stop; the father’s box of cash grows smaller until the young man announces that he will drop out of school, although he still plans to continue a strict self-imposed reading regime. In contrast to the father’s oblivion and slow decay, the mother and son grow acutely aware of the woman and her daughter who live downstairs. In one of the novel’s many strikingly visualscenes, the young narrator hangs upside down from his window ledge, hoping for a view of the young girl downstairs. As the blood rushes to his head, he fantasizes about being the one “who will bring something unchildlike from her body, a body that returns sweaty and exhausted from school. [He wants] her to be ignorant of her body, unaware of its forces.” Gradually, with a cruel indifference, the narrator’s mother detaches from her failing husband, and aligns herself with the woman downstairs. In an image reminiscent of French impressionism meets post-colonial poverty and futility, the two women picnic in the sand under a huge umbrella “looking for something that [is] increasingly unlikely to happen.”

 

Yet, quietly and insidiously, something does happen. The young man ventures out on his hopping penguin feet to find meaningless employment comparing two identical texts. His debased economic and professional stature ridicules urban pretensions to civilization.

 

Simultaneously, his conniving mother arranges for her penguin son to sleep with the woman downstairs. In a lonely, uncomfortable and laborious sexual encounter, the young penguin, never forgetting the maternal “spying eye,” ultimately mounts the white slack corpulence of his mother’s friend. Once this physical and moral threshold has been crossed, the two women begin to travel to the new city at night, and as the young girl also looks towards the city, her face grows “sly and expectant,” its “tiny hairs over the lip giving that toughness an even stranger glint.” With the father’s death, the young man manages to sell the apartment’s furniture, as well as his many books. Freed from the clutter of the past, he resolutely claims, “This is my home: I will not simply live here: I will live off this house. I will eat from it.”

 

Nevertheless, the son repeats his father’s behavior, continually revisiting the past and his self-delusion of ‘taking action’ through routine. Daoud’s stark and original narrative charts a domestic dance of solitary desolation, punctuated by the haunting refrains of empty space. The novel will lead the reader into a moment of awed silence, a reminder that value lies not just in times of action, but also in life’s brief pauses.