Myth 1: You need to understand Tunisian history to engage with this book. FALSE
Myth 2: You need to be into politics or journalism to get wrapped up in this book. FALSE
Myth 3: This is a book for anyone drawn to the impacts of trauma, suppressive and oppressive systems, pitfalls of academic institutions (TW: including sexual coercion), emotionally-wrought domestic fiction, relationships between men and women, mediations on our societal fall-out with the written word. TRUE

Maybe there's more on GoodReads, but I am SO. DISTRAUGHT. to see, at this current time of writing, only 3 reviews on this powerful book. It starts out like this: "No one at the cemetery that day could understand why Abdel Nasser had lashed out so violently" (1). Sorry, Camus, but I'm going to give this one to Mabkhout here. It feels insensitive and somehow verging on reductive to say "deliciously circular narrative," but that's honestly how I felt. Oh, and get this - we are reminded some times more than others, but this is written in FIRST. PERSON. POINT. OF VIEW. By someone who knew both our characters. IT'S ALL CONNECTED TO THIS JOURNALISM THEME.

Our story focuses around two writers (of sorts): a journalist, Abdel Nasser, and his partner Zeina. At different points in time, we get to see how both of them become the people they are today. Zeina is an academic en route to becoming a philosophy professor, ambition that we see from her early years, where she reads English and French and Russian canon and her teachers accuse her of plagiarizing. When we talk about introverts and extroverts, I might refer back to this line: "her teachers first discovered her through her writing" (78). Young Abdel Nasser is also a compulsive reader, and offers me reminders for my own life: "He loved books and reading: he read novels, poetry, philosophy, history, everything. He would always tell Taher that, with a few exceptions, the teachers were idiots who hadn't read a quarter of what he had" (98). So from the onset, Zeina and Nasser match intellectually. And they become, sort of, just that - intellectual companions. At one point, with Zeina's busy schedule, they only interact through written notes in the day.

Nasser still holds his critical attitude as an adult, with a sharp tongue that I find humorous. He finds a kindred spirit in this older journalist, but for the most part becomes disillusioned by his field and by people as a whole: "Abdel Nasser realized that what he saw in his neighborhood looked a lot like the world of journalists and intellectuals he spent time with.... IT was a world of gossip, hate, slander, lying, hypocrisy, and dangerously wounded egos. A world with neither the old inherited morals, nor the new journalistic and literary morals... Most of them didn't even read the newspaper they wrote for. As for books and keeping up with new ideas in literature and culture, that was far too much to ask. El-Talyani would wonder, incredulously, How can someone who doesn't read, write?... They were garrulous when discussing big names they'd heard. They would catch a word from intellectuals' or academics' mouths, then inject it into sentences where it did not fit. They used words from the philosopher's lexicon without knowing what they meant, or what the people who had coined them intended by them. They talked about films they'd never seen and books they'd never read" (276-7). Nasser tests this theory, as well, making up fake references and finding them regurgitated and morphed eventually back to him as if real tales.

But of course, we can't really address relationships in this sense without talking about intimacy and sex. Which is a HUGE theme in the book - both consensual and nonconsensual, confirmed and unconfirmed. Just let the word "flesh knife" (117) sit with you. If anything, I was surprised at the prominence of rape, but I've mentioned this as well in other books, which should probably just speak to my naivety and sheltering as to the prominence of this serious issue that extends beyond societies (plural) to human society as a whole. As well, here, words become important: "She got revenge on them every day, killing them in a page or two. She could only give voice to her resentment and describe her crimes in French, not in Arabic. No one would find what she was writing, but if they did, they wouldn't understand it. She learned pun and metaphor... So even if someone who knew French were to read it or if she put her words into action, no one would understand what she had planned" (117).

Now, I don't want to end this review on this note (but, let's be honest, the book is serious and sad), so I'm going to end with Abdel Nasser's Advice from basically a mentor: "The president... told him about the great Russian novelists and about Latin American writers and American novels...
"If he particularly liked a novel that he'd read, he would give it to Abdel Nasser. He would ask Abdel Nasser if he had read such-and-such a writer from Europe or Japan. If the answer was no - which it usually was - in a day or two he would bring him a novel or play or poetry collection by the writer he had mentioned.
"One thing Abdel Nasser did not understand was Si Abdel Hamid's hatred for poetry, despite his great knowledge of it. He asked him about it once.
"'Poetry is a rhetorical exercise,' the president responded, 'whereas the novel is the mother of deep truths.'
"Abdel Nasser debated with him a lot... What surprised him was Si Abdel Hamid's disdain for le film d'auteur and his love for commercially successful blockbusters... He explained: 'A film d'auteur is like a lover sleeping in his beloved's bed while she's absent, imagining her with him. Whereas the real movie actually recounts the dream. It tells the story in a far superior way to those stupid films of Godard and the like'" (160-161).