The writer's imagination makes up for the deficiency." An interview with novelist Saad

"The writer's imagination makes

In most of his novels, we are astonished and feel strange as he deals with sensitive issues in society that no one else has ever dealt with. An Iraqi novelist wove his own style into the novel, so his novels were stars and their titles were preserved in the reader’s memory.

It is characterized by the fluidity of the language and the astonishment of the content. It is one of the conflicts of the century in which we live, pictures of our lives that we hide in the darkness of fears and difficult experiences, so that the fingertips of the novelist Saad Odeh can liberate them, confronting society with his sober literature.

To reveal the novelist’s secrets, we had this conversation:

✍ Does a novelist need to travel to feed his imagination?

_ Although travel gives the novelist vision and knowledge of different worlds and enriches his information, it does not represent a necessity that prevents the writer from completing a work of fiction. The writer’s imagination here can compensate for this lack of knowledge, as for those who live in a country like Iraq, which is loaded with millions of stories that serve as narratives. Possess all the excitement required, they won't need

To travel to get a suitable story to be turned into a novel.

✍ How do we recall those we lost due to death, and is there a reason that makes a person dependent on knowing what happened to the loved ones who left him?

_This depends on the nature of this loss. A person is hardwired to forget, but when this loss occurs in an arbitrary manner, then it will form a wound that will never heal and a memory that is always present, and here it turns into an action that can be used.

Dramatically, death here turns into an existentially unjustified act that requires an appropriate and sometimes extreme reaction.

✍ In your novel (The Shadow of the Angel), the novel was shocking to the reader. We were following the duality of heroism with passion, but you surprised us with it? Is this symbolic of the Iraqi reality?

_ It is difficult for a writer to get rid of his reality while writing, but at the same time he does not write reality as it is, but rather pours into it many imaginations and philosophical visions so that the resulting mixture bears characteristics

Excitement and astonishment, in addition to the writing technique that gives the reader a different vision of reality. In this novel, reality is intertwined with imagination and philosophical vision with the pressure of the different and extreme other who is capable of crushing the dream. Love here is the main driver of events, it is the dream that is destroyed by the political, social and religious reality, of course.

This is part of reality, but it is dealt with in the novel with a vision that opens up to all intellectual and philosophical possibilities.

✍ Can a mother die because of her disappointment in her children, as happened in the aforementioned novel? How did you get the idea to write this scene?!

- Of course, therefore the son is the mother’s goal and part of her being, and when she sees him drowning in worlds of destruction

Sin may lead to her death, especially when she feels unable to repair this damage that has befallen her liver. This is a point of pain that leads events to a strange end, such as a living man sleeping in a coffin.

✍ Where will it take us after (Angel’s Shadow, Upside-Down Sole, Necromantic) stations that are heavy in weight, deep in meaning, smooth in style and modern in formula؟

My last novel is (The Necromantic), and I think it is the most important and surprising novel. I will first try to find an outlet to print and publish the novel and monitor the reactions to it, and I will start writing my next novel. Writing for me is life itself. This is how I live my life.

✍ UNESCO selects the novel (Inverted Sole) and publishes it on its websiteAnd her Twitter page is part of her interest in writers and creators of the world’s cultural capitals, and Baghdad is one of them. This news was a source of illumination and pride that was added to Iraq. Can you describe your feelings to us at that time?

- It was an important gesture, to have my novel Iraq represented on this platform, and I think the subject of the novel, which is compatible with the work of the organization, is what made it prefer this novel to the rest of the novels, and of course I was very happy, especially since Iraqi books in general need

It is urgent to highlight it, so that it can be exported to the world in an appropriate way...any attention here is necessary as an informational and promotional aspect of creative work.

✍ (Sleeping with a dead lizard), why this strange title that calls for curiosity, what is the symbolism of the work?

_ This novel discussed the theme of castration with all its formative and symbolic connotations and with all its political and social implications. This required great boldness and going into virgin areas that many had not visited. From here came the symbolism of the lizard as a formal representation of the male organ that is being castrated in all its ugliness, and from the standpoints of the past and present, intellectual castration here. It is the most important thing, which is why ideologies tried to put pressure on those holding ideas in order to dispossess them and prevent them from taking action

Just like what happens with a eunuch...

✍ “Where do you go after I die? I am Saad Odeh, “Inverted Sole,” with the frankness and sincerity of the departed, or is it the tragedies that hurt us while we are alive?

This was the father’s question on his deathbed, a question that was repeated many times in reality and remained unanswered, as if I were here explaining the loss of children within society due to the loss of the breadwinner, educator, and protector. The death of fathers is a threshold for the loss of children if they do not find an alternative. This happened a lot because of the wars that were Meaningless, but its remnants were disastrous for society.

✍ How are the children in Iraq, excuse me, the birds in the Arab world?

- Perhaps there are children who live appropriately within families that can contain them, but we have to justify this wrongful presence of children on the street and their forcing them to engage in work that takes away their childhood, which will make their future ambiguous, ambiguous and perhaps tragic. Therefore, we are the ones who planted the seed of crime and violence within them and we are the ones who will reap its fruits... .

✍ Sleeping in a closed coffin is the best place in someone’s mind. What brings a person to this point?

_ Intellectual loss and despair about the usefulness of life as a result of the hero being exposed to a severe emotional shock that will lead him to sleep inside a coffin, as a form of rejection of what his life has turned into and rebellion against all that exists in this life, and perhaps an announcement of a moral death that can replace real death (coffins here They are similar to mothers, but they are not

She leaves you until they put you in your final resting place)... This is how the hero feels an inner emptiness and tries to cling to death as the only alternative to an impossible life.

✍ The word that might make me happy as the conclusion of our dialogue is (yes). Is there a new novel?

_There is a new vision after everything we have been through. It is what led us to this new novel. We emerged from the ordeal carrying many things, perhaps with great pain and dark despair, but also with a broad vision and another understanding of life, and even of existence itself. The ordeal itself led us to write differently and to leave a work imprint. My creativity carries many features of modernity and places the Iraqi novel in a distinctive place in the Arab world and even internationally. The road may be at its beginning, but it will lead us to the forefront in terms of the power of creative influence and renewed written action.

✍ Thank you, for this creative flow, for your valuable time, and for your answers that are illumination in the world of the novel.