Absent
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Book Overview
Dalal is a young woman living in a crowded Baghdad apartment with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her. In the same building, Umm Mazin, a fortune-teller, offers her customers cures for their physical and romantic ailments, Saad the hairdresser attends to a dwindling number of female customers, and Ilham, a nurse, escapes the stark realities of her hospital job in dreams of her long-lost French mother. Despite the damaging effects of bombings and international sanctions on their world, all the residents try to maintain normal lives. Hoping to bring in much-needed cash by selling honey, Dalal's uncle becomes a beekeeper, enlisting Dalal's help in the care of these temperamental creatures. Meanwhile, Dalal falls in love for the first time-against a background of surprise arrests, personal betrayals, and a crumbling social fabric that turns neighbors into informants. Tightly crafted and full of vivid, unforgettable characters, Absent is a haunting portrait of life under restrictions, the fragile emotional ties among family and friends, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0812977424
ISBN13:9780812977424
Release Date:July 2007
Publisher:Random House Publishing Group
Length:240 Pages
Weight:0.43 lbs.
Dimensions:0.6" x 5.7" x 8.0"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Absent
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
i spent a lot of time looking for an Iraqi novel, set in Iraq, written by an Iraqi and was not just about war, death, torture and misery. This book gave an interesting and fair account of Iraq during the '90's. I found the normalcy she described refreshing and reflected the times i lived in. The novel is written in a way that it gives its reader a sense that the author had a collection of short stories that she found could be woven together in a clever way. I did not give it a 5 star rating for several reasons. Some of the historical facts are inaccurate; the inaccuracy was in sequence of events rather than describing the events themselves. I also had a sense that the author was afraid to put in writing how people felt about the conditions they found themselves in and the mass murders that were happening-the rumours that were usually truths. No opinions are given about saddam, the Kuwaiti invasion or the war. her characters did express some opinions about the sanctions, however. Why? are we still afraid to say anything negative about Saddam even now? The author does live in Jordan...
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