Lines of pain

The writer Mohamed Jalal Farraj continues his project "The Smell of Paper." With the second book, "Lines of Pain," he searches through his scraps and pastes them next to each other to bring out stories that no one has paid attention to. In this book, he takes us to the last days of Rushdi Abaza and how he defied death. Then, he monitors the intertwined relationships in the family of Badie Khairi and his son Adel, and the latter's dispute with Mary Munib, putting us before Tawfiq's guilt. Al-Hakim, and the tragedy of Mohamed Fawzi, shows us the last scenes of Salah Mansour on his death bed, and shocks us with the paradox between Abdel Fattah Al-Qasri and Zeenat Sidqi on the screen and in their painful reality, and we live with him the tragedies of Laila Murad and her son Zaki. We search with him for Ibrahim Abdel Razek... and we cry for Omar Khorshid and Ahmed Zaki, to close the last pages of the book with a picture of Sherine Saif Al-Nasr.
He says in the introduction to his book: "This book is not a regurgitation of pain, nor a regurgitation of tears, nor a target for tragedy, but it is an attempt - only an attempt - to monitor life moments and human paradoxes marred by cruelty and shrouded in sorrow in the lives of creative people who passed through here, after they had only recently filled the public space with joy, and added to the national stock a lot of happiness, to the point that people thought that the lives of these people were devoid of pain, and the anguish did not know their way. The treacherous arrows of time always miss them, and it is a perception that these lines deny, but not in the manner of cathartic "posts" or picking up posts on the Internet that are full of lies. Rather, they are honest lines that came fresh from the womb of their pain.
The paths of life are many and intertwined, full of harsh windings at times and soft at other times. The heroes of this book lived them through the sweet and the bitter. The print press captured the sweet and also recorded the bitter, an accurate record full of details and full of inspiring human snapshots that require an "observing" eye, not a "snapping" eye. The difference between the two eyes is great because the second takes in the published general scene without putting it in its temporal and human context. It is circulated cheerfully across the social media pages, with resonant headlines that steal hearts, attract shares, and attract old searchers for "hot Bluetooth clips."