“The Absence Player” is a surreal novel, written by Nabil Abu Hamad. It deals with the biography of an artist who appears carrying a canvas, and his mind is preoccupied with the colors and shapes that he intends to dictate on the blank canvas. When he tries to cross to reach the café on the other side of the street, where a cup is waiting for him. Cappuccino” as usual every morning; A speeding car comes and throws him flying into an absurd space full of madness and loss.
Through this sudden event, the “collision,” the writer depicts the events of his novel in a metaphorical space that does not exist in tangible reality. The narrator, the “player of absence,” who is the hero of the novel, will enter into a coma in which his mind does not differentiate between reality and imagination, and he will find himself on the back of a parrot that carries him and flies away, outside of space and time, and with every stop he stops at, his condition changes and he meets different people in their shapes and forms. , including leaders, kings, writers, poets, sages, angels, demons, animals, birds and other ordinary people. But when talking to them, they transform into strange, unfamiliar forms, and perform actions that are beyond reasonableness. Perhaps the novelist here wanted to place the character of the “artist – the musician of absence” at a crossroads between survival and destruction, and to introduce him into a strange world to express the crisis of contemporary man and his disappointment in achieving what he aspires to. To Himself within the real world; Her death also reveals a feeling full of nihilism and despair.