It makes its political points all the more effectively for not being strident or directly propagandistic. The novel is supposedly told as a letter from Saeed, who has been rescued by space aliens. His ideas are constantly being refuted by the realities, but he just doesn't catch on.
He believes whatever the authorities tell him, and works as an agent for the Israeli government, though rather ineffectively. Avoiding the Romantic or Naturalist style of much political fiction, instead of heroes and villains Habiby gives us an anti-hero, Saeed, as naive and unintelligent as Candide, though a "pessoptimist" rather than an optimist (instead of thinking everything happens for the best, he thinks it isn't as bad as it might have been).
A black comedy modeled on Voltaire's Candide, set in the years after 1948, when the Palestinians were driven out of Palestine by the Zionists.
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