Adam's Labyrinth

The novel “Adam’s Labyrinth” by the Iraqi poet and writer Burhan Shawi constitutes the first labyrinth, the foundation, and the introduction to his series of novels called “Labyrinths,” which are respectively: Adam’s Labyrinth, Eve’s Labyrinth, Cain’s Labyrinth, the Labyrinth of Ghosts, Iblis’s Labyrinth, the Labyrinth of Forgotten Souls, the Labyrinth of the Blind.
The labyrinth of prophets, the labyrinth of the great nothingness.


In this novel, the novelist Burhan Shawi adopts the Russian “Matryoshka” technique as well as the “Chinese box” technique, where the narratives intertwine, not in the manner of One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade tells her intertwined and different stories, but here the narratives intertwine to repeat themselves in a different time and place, and with new character names, but they repeat the cycle of human life, and the essence of the events, the same.

It is an attempt to aesthetically reshape the harsh and crude realities of life, and to capture moments of difference between real life and its reshaping and narration in literature. But the question arises: to what extent is a life experience suitable to be a narrative experience? And where, I wonder, does the truth of things and events lie? In the ambiguous life experience and reality, and in the unspoken language, or in the scandalous narrative facts and the shocking language in the narrative text?

A novel about the tragic destinies of humankind, about doubt and deep faith that leads to new doubt, and about misunderstandings between people that lead between tragedy and estrangement. It is a novel about unbridled instincts, and about love besieged by suspicious intentions. A novel about humankind in the labyrinth of this existence.