the secret life of saeed the pessoptimist

Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, 'Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?' and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke.

Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. An entertaining and thought-provoking minor classic.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The story is intensely partisan, but it’s much more than a polemic, thanks to Habiby’s incisive satiric characterizations of true believers and extremists of all persuasions, and especially to an inspired framing device whereby Saeed, having finally escaped the madness of Mideast politics, tells his amazing story from a most unconventional perspective.

Habiby’s Saeed, close kin to both Voltaire’s Candide (as this novel glancingly acknowledges) and Hasek’s “Good Soldier Schweik,” is a nondescript opportunist who becomes a paid informer for Israeli government officials-until the examples of a courageous namesake and his only son Walaa (a martyred freedom fighter) elevate him beyond his innate cowardice and ignorance. A comic antihero’s unexpected transformation from wily survivor into principled man of his people is observed with ebullient wit and understated empathy in this famous 1974 novel by Habiby, a Palestinian Arab (1919–98) who lived in Israel and was elected to the Knesset.

The secret life of saeed the pessoptimist