Author: Balsam Karam
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo
Paperback
One of our books of the year 2024!
Forest says: The three-part structure and beguiling prose behave like an incantation, imparting on the reader a somatic effect. Like the experience of loss itself - there is the lead up, frantic, repetitive, relentless. The loss, shocking and detached. And the immediate aftermath, a rumination on the intricacies of cruelty and displacement.
Lu says: In the midst of global crises and war today, this is a particularly charged and resonant study of displacement, of refugees and questions of motherhood. I was drawn to the story’s setting - set everywhere and nowhere with the vast changing entities of desert and sea - repeatedly encountered as a mother searches for her lost daughter and the narrative focuses increasingly on the children she neglects, and a third woman with a link to the missing daughter and her own pregnancy trauma. Grief resides between past and present, written tenderly and meandering, from chaotic cacophony to one’s simple pure voice. What chilled me and remained was that the pain of one mother is the pain of another, the indelible imprint of a child felt, generation to generation. Written and read in the second person, one joins the act of such witnessing.