the secret life of saeed the pessoptimist summary

The story follows the adventures of Saeed the Pessoptimist, a Palestinian who stays behind after the creation of the state of Israel, becomes an Israeli informer, and finds himself getting into one scrape after another with the authorities, while becoming more and more estranged from his sometime-countrymen.

Innocence hangs like a thin film of translucent dew upon the surface, barely masking a savage indictment of the human condition just beneath (think of Voltaire’s Candide). You cannot forbear to laugh, but the moment you pause to reflect, the laughter dissolves into the underlying darkness. “But I cut the melons open with a knife so the buyer can see,” the “mule” responded.Įmile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist brings Rabelais and Swift to Israel and Palestine. With a watermelon, moreover, one could blow up a whole regiment if grenades were hidden inside it.

Whoever, as they put it, transported red melons in secret could also carry radishes secretly and there was, after all, only a difference in colour between red radishes and hand grenades! And red was not, under any circumstances, the same as blue and white. My going to Shafa Amr to buy melons, they said, had threatened the integrity of the state. They led me off to prison after charging me publicly with having disobeyed the compulsory stay order. The big man sent his own men to surprise me at my stall one noon.

The secret life of saeed the pessoptimist summary