Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud on the science behind his craft

You once said you wrote this novel as 'an act of remembering.' Can you elaborate?

I was indeed remembering, but not in the sense of summoning memories at will. Before I began writing, I was consumed with nostalgia for the time we lived in that building. It was a refuge from the fear and anxiety of the war, which constantly reminded us of its fierce presence.

I would return to Nabihah al-Shaibani, our neighbour, and also Madam Lore, and Aida, who lived on the fourth floor below us. I used to tell my closest friends—perhaps exaggerating—that I was living in the past for eight hours every day.

That's how I began writing, deeply immersed in the world I had left 20 years before. However, writing requires introducing different elements to that legacy (of memory). You cannot rely solely on emotion and nostalgia to write a true piece of literature.

There was some creative effort involved, but it wasn't strenuous. It was a smooth kind of creativity, such as inventing scenes I had never witnessed, like imagining my uncle, while hurriedly descending the stairs, stopping to start shadow boxing as a warm-up before reaching the gym.

That was creative work, or invention, which a friend of mine, the poet Abbas Beydoun, once described in an article about The House of Mathilde as "imagination within memory."

Do you ever go back to read or browse through your novel, and if so, what do you find in it? Do you ever want to rewrite or rephrase anything in it? Expand or shorten some passages?

I actually used to read it while I was writing it, even if it was only 300 words. I would re-read it not just to revise or correct potential errors but to enjoy it and to relish in the fact that I was the one writing it, that I was its author. But interestingly enough, I didn't do that with the works I wrote afterwards.

I didn't think of rewriting any passages, perhaps because my first novel received such good reviews. However, in the final chapter, there is a combination of two scenes: one describing the explosion that brought down the staircase and its surroundings, making the building resemble a hollowed-out eggplant, and another of my cousin running while carrying his child, with the collapsing staircase nearly dragging them both down. This rapid sequencing of the two scenes still feels contrived to me.

In your subsequent novels, the influence of The House of Mathilde seems to be there. Could it be said that your debut novel served as a kind of personal literary manifesto? I think your style and deliberate pacing began there but evolved differently.

When I wrote The House of Mathilde, I didn't intend for it to be a manifesto or literary statement. I was far more modest and sceptical than that. Even now, after all these years of being deeply involved in writing, I am still not trying to create a particular method or literary movement, per se. Yes, I still use slow-paced sentences and more or less adhere to my own personal style, but this is not a conscious decision.

You say you belong to what you've read, not a movement or a generation. What are your readings, and how have they influenced your writing and style? Where does this tendency towards slow-paced narration and meticulous care for every sentence and word come from?

I derive my understanding of literature from living with it, meaning from its details and the issues my engagement with it raises. I know what I like in others' words and what I do not. I cannot say that I am a fan or follower of a particular literary movement. Everything I've read and liked has influenced my writing in some way. When I was writing my novel, Extra Days, I was deeply inspired by ancient Arabic poetry, which I was passionate about and had returned to reading at that time. I still think of this work as being closer to an ode or a long poem than a novel.

In your novel, The Penguin's Song, the protagonist seems to be heavily influenced by the character Benjy and his famous monologue in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. There is also a trace of this influence in one of the chapters of your novel, One Hundred and Eighty Sunsets. Can you speak to this?

Benjy astonished me from the moment he first appeared in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner presents him in an absolutely brilliant way, as he steps forward to pick up the white golf balls, only for his sister to take them away before he can get to them. "And I cried," as Benjy says, or as Faulkner makes him say. He is a 30-year-old child.

It's not just Benjy, and it's not only The Sound and the Fury; everything I've read by Faulkner amazes me. He loved to give voice to everything – the fish, the horse, or even the cart pulled by the horse – making everything describe what was going on inside it.

I sometimes think that Faulkner's works have influenced all innovations in contemporary novels. In One Hundred and Eighty Sunsets, there are several characters that I've known in my life, one of them being Khalil. I knew those characters from a temporary residence in one of the war shelters I moved between. Khalil was as I described him, though I added some obscene actions that the novel required. Perhaps Khalil was inspired by Benjy and my deep admiration for Faulkner.

In all your works, there is an underlying layer of writing that runs parallel to, and even outshines, the story itself. Is there a hidden poet somewhere in your writing?

I don't consider this "underlying" layer to be separate but a part of my overall writing style. It is not meant to outshine the story and characters but is central to my overall vision of their formation. To me, it is not just about narrating events but attaching deeper meaning to them.

When I first started reading, I would underline every creative sentence I came across while also being aware of the danger that these sentences might overshadow the narrative text itself.

The late novelist Ghalib Halasa said that a writer ultimately writes one single novel due to their style and tone of writing. Do you agree?

Writers are often unaware of the dominance of their style over their subsequent works. They most likely don't notice it, as evidenced by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, they wait for others to tell them what their style really is.

They believe the work they have just completed is new as long as there are new characters and relationships between them. For instance, I've always felt that my first two books, The House of Mathilde and Extra Days, are completely different. To me, they appear as if they were penned by two different people, with no resemblance in direction, approach, or the presence or absence of humour.

I know that I can identify the difference between them because of the fundamental distinction in what is being narrated: here, a world is being discovered through the eyes of a young boy, while there, an elderly man is struggling through his last days.

That's how I saw them, and they remained that way until many years after they were published. Perhaps this is because I hadn't yet discovered my style, which would later pursue me in my subsequent works. I say "pursue me" here because I've grown tired of writing forms that come to me effortlessly as if they've taken hold of me, so I strive to replace them with other forms.

This relates to other aspects, connected to style and meaning, as well. This pursuit intensifies over time, to the point where it could stop a writer from writing altogether. I suspect this was the case with Ernest Hemingway, when he said he no longer knew how to write. And perhaps this was also the case with Gabriel García Márquez, who, despite many attempts, was unable to finish his last book.

In several of your novels, you chronicle and narrate the lives of your family members—your grandfather in Extra Days, your mother in The Game of the Al-Bayyad Neighborhood, and a significant portion of your family's work in The Year of the Automaton. Do you yourself appear in any of your novels?

I have written about what I have lived, not just in these three books but in others. I was not a neutral observer watching from the outside. I was present—more than present—in all of these novels. I was present as I described what was revealed of Aida's legs when she lifted her body to reach the highest shelf in her home library.

To a significant extent, I drew from myself in my narrative about my grandfather to portray him as the novel's protagonist. I also had to go even further when writing about his father, whom I never knew, as he had passed away before my father was born. In this sense, I was present in other characters.

This applies even to people who were not family members, like the young man in The Penguin's Song. It would have been impossible for me—someone who had never spoken to him—to write a complete novel about him without imparting much of myself into him.

What's your general view of Lebanese literature?

I don't think the country's writers can be grouped into one category. Every novelist in Lebanon writes in their own way, and this applies to writers all over the world. Perhaps comparisons—whether grouping together or differentiating works—are possible if you narrow down the topic, for example: "Novels on the Lebanese Civil War." However, the idea of a writer—Lebanese or otherwise—belonging to a certain category doesn't make much sense to me.

In a novel like The Penguin's Song, I agree with you that its spatial setting seems undefined, even though what it seeks to explore and convey is the impact of war on people and how it displaced them from their places, and so on…

In this context, why does Lebanese literature, especially what was written during and after the civil war, seem to belong to a single generation of writers? How do you view this, and why do you think Lebanese literature has not produced diverse trends as seen in Egypt, for example?

Are you suggesting that Lebanese novel writing has been limited to a single generation and then ceased? I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate, as new writers are still publishing novels. However, I do agree that the names that continue to shine in the realm of Lebanese literature are often those who wrote about the war during its time.