The puppeteer Dingo's carriage hits a young child while passing through the village of Artemilla, the miserable village from which he fled years ago to join a troupe of acrobats, aspiring to make his entire life a continuous festival. He resorts to his old friend, Juan Medinao, to help him in this predicament, but his contact with the village master will finally awaken the details of the painful past, and with them he will begin a relentless journey through memory, recalling his relationship with his father, his mother’s suicide, and the mixture of hatred and love that he felt towards his brother. Stepbrother.
In this small-sized novel, but with a big impact, Anna Maria Matute is able to delve into the depths of her characters, searching for the deep scars that childhood leaves in their souls, revealing with keen insight and high sensitivity the most complex and profound human feelings, in a dense narrative that makes room for emotional feelings. Inferiority, fear, isolation, and hatred can tell their story too.
In this novel, “Sabwat Yassin,” we will see the fictional character of the intellectual divided into two characters, the character that the state created, fabricated, and presented as its true self. The original character who escaped from this dark fate went to the home of the religious people from whom he had tried to escape, and then to the community of the Non-Qabalan, a tribe seeking peace who had no dream except to escape from the Qabalan, the sons of Cain, the eternal killer.
Yassin escapes and flees, but the state is bigger, and we will read in the novel: “He looked again in the mirror... The face is a real Yassin, there is no doubt, no doubt, no worry about it. But what about this large number of Yassins in the mirrors, Yasin the face, Yasin the back, Yasin the right? Yassin on the left, Yassin al-Qadhali in front, and Yassin al-Yami on the left.”
Sabwat Yassin is an image of an intellectual torn between the dream of a universal culture and an oppressed society
. في زمن غابر ولى في غفلة من قبائل ارض العرب ... استيقظ خطر كان يتربص بهم منذ عقود خطر تجسد بهيئة رجل ...لقبه اتباعه ب (الماران) كاهن تبعه من تبعه بدعوى نبوءات لا تخطئ من يراها في يقظته ومنامه ثار هذا الكاهن على حاكمه سلب عرشه بمعاونة اتباعه المغيبين ليس ليعتيليه ... بل ليحطمه.