From alive to dead

In his book, "From Alive to Dead - To My Brother," Tawfiq Hassan Al-Shartouni presents a painful personal experience transformed into a literary work brimming with honesty and emotion. After the sudden passing of his young brother, Tanios, following a short illness, the writer found himself immersed in a whirlpool of loss, seeking solace in writing, attempting to defeat death with words. Al-Shartouni wrote successive letters addressing his brother as if he were alive, recalling their shared memories and conveying to him the concerns and issues of daily life, as if extending an eternal thread between this world and the afterlife. With each letter, the presence of the absent person grows at the heart of the text, until the reader becomes a partner in the journey of grief and contemplation of the meaning of life and death. The writer concludes his work with a collection of tender elegiac poems by other poets, transforming the pages into a collective elegy that affirms that literature is capable of immortalizing memory and transforming the pain of loss into an act of eternal love and loyalty.

توفيق حسن الشرتوني (1870–1940م) أديب لبناني. كتب في الصحافة الأدبية والمقالات الفكرية. ساهم في دعم الحركة الثقافية في بلاد الشام. وكان له حضور في المنتديات الأدبية العربية.