"Open Illusions Party" revolves around the mysterious circumstances of the disappearance of a well-known Belgian writer and poet “Jan de Schipper” Who left nothing behind but a letter in which he states that he is going to get rid of all of his novels and poems, and all of the drawings he had painted, by burning them, in his own garden located in Ostend, Belgium, by the North Sea. He disappeared, however, without implementing that decision for an unknown reason. The Belgian police found no trace of him. Being a public figure, his disappearance occupied the public opinion, press and media in Belgium. Having failed in using the traditional methods of investigation to solve the case, the investigator, Eric Van Martin, thought of reading the novels of the missing writer: two published ones and the third still a manuscript. Then, he reads his poetry and presented some of his poems to a Belgian literary critic; and some of his last paintings were presented to an art critic. Finally, he listens to their critical review with the aim of employing literature and art in criminal investigation, to catch a clue that might explain the mysterious disappearance of the writer and to know his whereabouts.
Thus, the sequence of the three novels begins, the first one titled “A Stranger on A Strange Land" published in 1988, has been written as a biography of the father of “Jan de Schipper”, Alfons de Schipper, a Belgian soldier who lost memory (amnesia) in the Korean War in 1951, whereby he gained the Korean citizenship, then he has been sent to Turkey due to similarity between him and a Turkish soldier who had been reported missed in the Korean War. In Turkey, he gains the Kurdish-Turkish citizenship. Then he discovers that he is not a Turkish. In 1961, he travels to Belgium to work in coal mines not as a Belgian citizen but as a Turkish migrant. He stays there with a deficit in memory and sense of belonging to Belgium between 1951 to 1985 when the death retrieves his memory all of a sudden.
The second novel is titled “The Dead Live More Than Us” published in 2013 deals with the friendship between Jan and his friend Omid Serkheti, the Kurdish – Turkish poet, who broke away from PKK with whom a Colombian translator falls in love just through reading his poems, and translating them from Turkish to Spanish even before they meet, and know him so closely, and then they separate.
And the third one – manuscript – is titled “A Blind Train Which Doesn't Miss Its Times” talks about Jorgan Reiner, a German researcher who speaks many languages and is mad with listening to the stories and conversations among passengers on trains. This novel talks about a journey on a train from Berlin to Brussel and then to Paris; and the stories that Jorgan heard during that journey.
"Open Illusions Party" finishes with an open ending: the investigator Eric Van Martin doesn’t discover the reason behind the disappearance of the Belgian writer Jan De Schipper, and he resigns from his work. The investigation, however, stays open and continues on this case.
The space of places and lives in this novel are overlapping and complex: the events take place in Belgium, Korea, Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, Colombia, Lebanon, Germany, Palestine and Pakistan. In addition to that, People’s destinies intertwine in this novel with the issue of identity and belonging, in addition to many other subjects and ideas such as: love, hope, despair, revolutions, alienation, migration, betrayal, refractions and disappointments.
Hosheng Ossi posted on his Facebook account about his second novel saying: in this novel there is challenge with “The Weight of Certainty…” in terms of size and stories, the second novel is smaller than the first one by up to 60 pages with plenty stories, overlapping of lives between people, homes and nations. That is to say, more stories and less words.
Ossi added, in "Open Illusions Party" there is an attempt to redress poetry, and refute the saying “the time of poetry is gone” and it is just the time of novel, poetry is present in this novel, as characters and texts, but aloof of employing the poetic language in narrative.
Hosheng Ossi has dedicated his novel to Alan Abdallah Shenno (who drowned in Aegean Sea on 02/09/2015) as well as the victims of illusions and truth.
In the introduction of the novel we read: No, never….. this no longer means anything to me but only a little of the past that chases and besieges the future, sometimes askance and other times with density. My artifice of escaping from truth has been creating an equal narrative to it. The artifice of truth assaulting me red handed out -of what I have done- is drowning me in anguish, sadness and unavailing of what I have narrated or written. Between these two artifices you aren’t obliged to waste your time, or a part of your short lives reading these pages which took what it has taken from my short life.
In 327 pages of medium size "Open Illusions Party" by the Kurdish-Syrian writer and poet Hosheng Ossi was published by Soual Publishing in Beirut, Lebanon. It is the second novel that is published by the house. His first one, “The Weight of Certainty… The Quandary of Question and the Lust of Imagination” was published in 2016, and won the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel in 2017, in the category of published novels.
"Open Illusions Party "