By: Nour El-Houda Fouad, Taarek Refaat
CAIRO, Feb. 13 (SEE)- Contrary to what we conceive about the notion correlating freedom and happiness, Austrian author Friederike Gösweiner said in her novel Sad Freedom "Traurige Freiheit" that everything has a price and a heavy burden called responsibility, adding "Freedom is not as happy as we imagine."
The novel, which was published in 2016, won the Austrian Book Award and was later translated in Arabic by Egyptian Al-Dar Al-Arabia For Publishing & Distribution, which hosted a seminar on Gösweiner's novel during the Cairo International Book Fair.
"To be an inpidual from the law's point of view is not to blame other than yourself for your unhappiness. The cause of your personal defeats always lies in our negligence and conformity, and the remedy is to shift and continue trying," Gösweiner quoted Zygmunt Bauman book "liquid modernity" during the seminar.
In the novel's Arabic version introduction, she wrote that the free, democratic, and plutocratic west believes that every inpidual is responsible for their own contentment and happiness. "However, this is true only, if an inpidual is completely isolated, and therefore no one can affect his happiness or sorrow," Gösweiner wrote.
"We are social beings, who value the true meaning of freedom, yet in the European societies, they neglected it," she said, adding that unlike the Arab countries, especially Egypt, people struggled, during the Arab Spring, to achieve liberty and freedom through solidarity and social cohesion rather than pision.
Even though readers will meet a lot of monotonous narratives at the beginning of the novel, such as unnecessary details, they will come to discover that this is exactly what the writer wants them to experience. Gösweiner wanted the readers to explore the heroine's "Hannah" world. Her life, which is full of emptiness, boredom, and frustration, makes the most basic events meaningful for her, and thus for the readers.
In the novel, Hannah struggles with her big ambitions and the results of her choices. Although she has done what everyone else has done to succeed, she is confronted by the fact that all these efforts and sacrifices work for many but, not for all. There are those who fail to reach their goals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8SpFNCazWY
The novel presents the doubts and fears of every young inpidual at the beginning of their careers, starting from their ambitions and plans that can be abandoned, ending with adventurous unknown.
She also presented the struggle between dreams and reality along with the sense of loneliness and constant failure amidst a materialistic world and the isolated cosmos resided by everyone during their journey.
While Hannah leaves her lover and country to work abroad as a journalist, the job she has always dreamed of, she ends up as a lonely waiter, who feels alienated in a foreign country.
Despite her constant failure, she never loses hope and finds a way to revive.
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