In Warrāq al-ḥubb (2008; Eng. Writing Love: A Syrian Novel, 2012), Khalīl Ṣuwayliḥ evokes the ever-present authorial angst of Harold Bloom's “anxiety of influence,” which he redeploys within the context of a troubled postcolonial, local and global politics of representation, translation, and comparative consumption. Ṣuwayliḥ is the 2009 recipient of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, and in this avant-garde novel he articulates a complicated set of anxieties and fears that paralyze the creativity of the author, threatening to consign his literature to the ghettoes of translated world literature; it is an unease so severe that it ultimately halts the beginning of his narrative. The text's male narrator alerts the reader to the act of writing, sharing his anxiety with his interlocutors and thereby producing a novel within a novel that mocks the very process of writing the literary genre to which it belongs. Of particular importance to this chapter is the way in which what I call the authorial mapping of a novel intersects with the spatial mapping of the old city of Damascus. As the author/narrator retraces lost love manuscripts in the streets of the city, he underlines the resemblance between “writing a novel and building homes brick by brick” (Ṣuwayliḥ 2008: 19). He further admits the following to his readers, “I have to break the laws of the novel, and to move comfortably amongst chronology and characters as if I were back in my parents’ house in the village where [discordant rooms] coexist in marvelous architectural form” (Ṣuwayliḥ 2008: 59).

This intersection between the literary and the urban is unique in the text as the writer equates his ability to write with that of constructing a house grounded in a strong local foundation. But his writing endeavor proves to be anything but “comfortable.” Indeed, the self-reflective design of the novel calls attention to the art of writing, and chronicles several attempts of aborted narrative beginnings by the narrator who searches unsuccessfully for an introduction to his book, anchored in the local tradition of premodern Arabic manuscripts. However, the narrator's constant allusions to the masterpieces of the Western canon throughout the narrative demonstrate that he is haunted by the influence of their celebrated, if domineering, narrative models.