Khalil Gibran
1912
4/5 stars
This short novel is a tragic love story taking place in Lebanon in the early 1900s. The young, unnamed protagonist falls in reciprocated love with Selma, the beautiful daughter of his father's rich friend, but she becomes betrothed to another.
Gibran, while delivering a simple and predictable story, is also discoursing on wealth, religious and political corruption, the lack of rights for women, and the ideal of love. It is beautifully written, with poetic prose that is, though, at times too flowery; this could, of course, be due to the translation into English from Arabic. The Broken Wings doesn't have the depth and maturity of his later work, the Prophet (my review here), but Gibran's ability to paint word pictures is fantastic, and his philosophical musings are intriguing, making this novella worth reading.
