Golden dog | Novel

Transformation was sweeping all of Tripoli. It seems that it no longer transforms and distorts those who come to it as it has done throughout history. Everything in it begins to transform: the streets, the parks, and the people. The converts are now transforming it, perhaps returning it as the priests of Osiris restored Lucius to what it was. Perhaps the Tripolitan oven is now burning itself, shattering and disintegrating into its original clay, valleys and reefs through which dogs, camels, deer, wolves and hyenas strive. It is the Tripolitan oven, then, where creatures do not stop transforming and distorting throughout all ages, and where they always groan, either the deer or the beauty, either Lucius, Apuleius’s golden donkey, or my hero, either Apuleius or me. This is a novel that breaks the barrier between the narrator and the reader, between the heroes of the novel as they struggle with imagined worlds and the heroes of reality as they coexist in real worlds. Saeed or Libecchio transforms, distorts, becomes angry, day and night from a spoiled dog who is unaware of the issue of awareness of existence into a human being destroyed by his awareness of his existence as a being struggling with time and space. It is an ongoing legend that may have begun with Apuleius' donkey, but it will certainly not end with Mansour Boushnaf's golden dog.