His picture and quotations from his speeches and poetry are everywhere. We’re in a dystopian society in the Middle East where The Leader, always capitalized, has created a society that not only worships him but exists to worship him. Tinged with a Kafkaesque sense of the absurd, The Silence and the Roar explores what it means to be truly free in mind and body.Ī 1984-ish political allegory by a Syrian author. His only weapon against the irrationality of the government employees is his sense of irony.
When Fathi turns himself in, he is led from one department to another in an ever-widening bureaucratic labyrinth. Fathi’s iD papers are confiscated and he is told to report to the police station before night falls. Desperate to get away from the noise and the zombie-like masses, Fathi leaves his house to visit his mother and his girlfriend, but en route stops to help a student who is being beaten by the police. The heat is oppressive and loudspeakers blare as an endless parade takes over the streets. The entire populace has mobilized to celebrate the twenty-year anniversary of the reigning despot in this unnamed Middle eastern country. The Silence and the Roar follows a day in the life of Fathi Sheen, an author banned from publishing because he refuses to write propaganda for the ruling government. Available in English for the first time, The Silence and the Roar is a funny, sexy, dystopian novel about the struggle of an individual over tyranny.
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