Il Sole 24 Ore, Domenica, by Giosue Calaciura
May 25, 2014

Only the narrative of horror seems to cancel the cultural diversity among the most impermeable Western civilisation and the Arab one. The recent and definitive awakening of Arabs is approaching…

In The Shell, Mostafa Khalifa, Arab Christian, a former film student in Paris, now in exile in France after 12 years of torture and imprisonment in the “prison of the desert” delregime of Assad father and son, it indicates where the two cultures intersect integrating horribly in oppression, nell’amnientamento in crudleta that any regime without pluralism, here and there, has been able to express. Each with its own “creativity” feral.

A novel-diary written with the ink of memory: in Syrian prisons, paper and pen do not enter… Khalifa, and many like him, train to memorise with the technique of Islamic prayer, recording dates, names, events, aided by the trivial repetition of eveil. All of Pellico, Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi, but also and above all Kafka are in this novel.