Short stories ( very short ones)...!!!

Dear members of the English forum :- here is a critique from Rebecca Tylor Sent by e- mail



Quote: Dear Osama, have had a look at your stories and, like I said, I think they are little prose poems or haiku stories! It's very interesting because I haven't seen anything like them before and they have a certain haunting beauty about them - charged with a melancholy essence. Ironically, because they are so small they give a sense of the largeness of the world and the smallness of the characters, whereas usually in a story you focus in on the characters and the rest of the world fades into the background. I think it may be this factor that affords them the whiff of loneliness that they have - they make me think of that phrase, the heartbreak at the heart of things. The presence of the narrator is also intriguing because we can feel that we are looking at a cameo through someone's eyes, that we are having things pointed out to us and this marks up the significance of small events in individual lives. also the language has a delicate, almost tiptoe quality, possibly because the English is filtered through another language. This could be because I know you're Sudanese though but, whatever it is, it feels like a plus rather than a negative to me. I think a collection of these would be lovely with illustrations, but that might be taking them away from the imagination and turning them into captions. There are one or two typos to iron out.

Arabic Forum