By Mursi Saad El-Din An Egyptian literary critic cleared a controversy when he published a book with the title The Age of the Novel : In his book he claims that the novel is the literary form most popular in Egypt and that the country is living the age of the novel. His claim was immediately refuted by a number of writers who insisted that the country is living, as it has always been, the age of poetry. Poetry is known as the Diwan of the Arabs, a genuine literary expression known for thousands of years. The novel, on the other hand, is a literary form imported in recent times from the West. While this controversy is going on, we find a thousand of miles away another controversy alive in the literary circles. Lee Siegel, a leading American commentator says that the era of great novelists such as Twain and Hemingway has passed as readers increasingly turn to non-fiction. Siegel wrote a piece in The New York Observer declaring that the American public no longer talk about novels and that this creative form, once so full of life, has lost its spark forever "for about a million reasons". Siegel claimed, fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. Few better or few worse, adds the writer "the greatest story tellers of our times are non-fiction writers". As expected these ideas created a battle in the United States with writers lining up on one side or another, the question asked is "Is the American novel dead or not?" By coincidence the Samuel Johnson prize for non- fiction was awarded a few days after Siegel's article. This, naturally, led to the raging of a battle in the book pages and on literary websites. Will American fiction ever compete with non-fiction? For contemporary relevance, critics on both sided are wondering. Some critics called for new talents and new genres, which they declare, are lacking. This is, certainly, not the case in Egypt, where a great number of young writers, both men and women, are emerging. Some of them have already established themselves as great writers. I shall not mention names for fear that I might miss some of them. But to go back to the American literature there is no doubt that there will be no American novels like the great American tales: Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckenberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Warm and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Those great American novels went beyond the borders to become world masterpieces. They were made into films and won international repute. The English critic of American literature is at the centre of the row, according to the Observer article. James Wood sums up the current crisis in fiction by opposing Siegel's contention, Siegel writes "May the gods bless my former New Republic Colleague and may he keep reviewing novels for another hundred years, but the emergence of Mr Wood signals the decline of fiction, his driving profession," he then goes on to claim that the death of an artistic form is evident when the analysis of it becomes so heavy. But the literate have their opinion. They argue that Siegel is using his thesis to get at a rival critic. Critics like Siegel, they claim, "have refused to even open the curtains in their ivory towers to see the wonderful burgeoning literary world that has sprung up around them." They are dismissive of book blogs, to genre fiction, of pretty much anything that, say, wouldn't be covered in the New York Observer.
