Borrowing our ideas and visions as they manifest in narratively captivating prose guided by values — images, imaginings, and delicate, alluring projections — such works render our journeys through the spaces of meaning, biography, life's questions, and lived reality profoundly affecting. Such is the case with the book Encrypted Messages by Syrian writer and journalist Bassam Fandi Blan, in which these qualities take shape, brimming with sincerity, as the work echoes anthems of humanity, justice, and goodness, and calls upon the homeland, imploring it to rise and shake off the dust of years and oppression. It also lifts the veil from our eyes and points, through its allusions, to the fault lines in society's conceptual framework.
Encrypted Messages, recently published by Metaverse Press, carries an intellectual cargo woven together with aesthetic qualities and varied panoramic narratives that reflect, in essence, the nature of the concerns preoccupying the author — concerns that represent, broadly, what weighs on the minds of the majority of his community's members, and intellectuals among them in particular.
What makes the book compelling is that Bassam Blan addresses his subjects in a fluid, intelligent style — occasionally sardonic, rich in metaphor, metonymy, and allusion — with the aim of offering us intellectual nourishment and illuminations that radiate wonder and delight, glimmering across the pages in simplified yet deeply resonant forms.
Panoramic texts
The book represents a bouquet of harmonious panoramic texts through which Blan takes us on radiant and pleasantly deconstructive journeys, opening vistas onto diverse fields as he strikes at, treats, and dissects varied affairs and issues — political, social, intellectual, cultural, and scientific. Yet the homeland remains the hero of his stories and the most prominent presence inhabiting his spirit, mind, heart, and pages. He delves deeply into examining and describing its concerns and what stirs within it, and charts the paths and roads to its peace, security, stability, and prosperity — for he, as we sense from the fragrance of his words and their crafting, is passionately devoted to his homeland, captivated by its civilisational lights and enchanted by the narratives of its heritage.
It is for this reason that he never tires, in this pursuit and passion, of searching for the lustre of his beloved Damascus, and seeking out everything that protects it, wards off its disorientation, safeguards its people, and guarantees the splendour of its present and future.
Stories and themes rooted in Blan's birthplace in his country of Syria emerge in the book as enduring pillars of the soul's being. We find him celebrating the values of his local community and playing upon the strings of nature's pure beauty and its people's goodness, as though singing the primordial song of eternity and original purity.
Within these worlds, the author recounts the depths of his feelings and what he has lived through across successive and numerous life experiences in those places that inhabit him — from when he was a child deeply attached to his mother, to when he became a young man visiting his grandparents in the village and discovering the pleasures of working in the fields, and when he began accompanying his father and assisting him in his trade, drinking from the wellspring of his father's concepts, culture, and guidance, through to the period when he became devoted to writing, journalism, and culture, and finally to the stage of marriage and fatherhood.
A captivating symphony
Encrypted Messages — introduced by Syrian novelist Najat Abd Al Samad, with a cover painting by visual artist Waddah Al Sayed — is a captivating symphony inhabited by meditations, stories of the homeland and goodness, adorned with wit, depth, suspense, and astonishment.
Among the titles it contains are: Dam Shaq… Damascus, A Confession on Valentine's Day, Laughing Up Your Sleeve, Al Baw, My Birthday, Forgive Me, O Heart, Aseel, Mr Bolívar, To My Mother, With Regards, Femininity… Nature and Culture, Account of 48 Hours in Prison, and My Grandfather's Sword.