Wednesday, January 23, 2019

The Broken Wings by Khalil Gibran

The Broken Wings
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.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hi there and thanks for commenting! Sometimes Blogger flags comments as spam despite my settings, so if your comment doesn't show up right away, it may be that I will have to manually approve it. I look forward to chatting with you!