2021/058: The Frightened Ones -- Dima Wannous, translated by Elizabeth Jaquette

The revolution erupted in an instant. And in that instant, monsters appeared. They filled our city, our homes, our living rooms. They hit and slapped and insulted and killed and destroyed a whole history of human relationships. [loc. 1083]

Suleima's family fled the massacre in Hama in 1982: then fled again, to Beirut, after the Syrian revolution of 2011. Suleima makes frequent trips back to Damascus to see her therapist, Kamil, in whose waiting room she meets and begins a relationship with Naseem. Naseem, like Suleima, like everyone who has survived the revolution, lives in a state of constant fear. Despite his fear of the sea, he flees across the Mediterranean, winding up in Germany, from where he sends Suleima the manuscript of a novel he's been working on -- a novel with a narrator, Salma, whose life seems to echo Suleima's own.

Apparently in the printed version the alternating chapters, Suleima's narrative and excerpts from Naseem's novel, are printed in different typefaces: that might have helped to distinguish them. While there are distinct differences between the two women's voices -- Suleima has more self-awareness, I think, and more subtlety -- it wasn't always easy to tell whose account I was reading.

Hard to crystallise my reaction to this novel: I felt pity for the characters, but didn't especially engage with them, and ... was uncomfortable reading about war and revolution and atrocities: far too real. There was a strong sense of the characters' constant fear, of Suleima's entirely rational anxiety (she takes Xanax to suppress the symptoms), and of her forlorn hope of discovering the fate of her missing brother, abducted by security services some years ago. She hopes he's dead, because the alternative is worse. 'My mother never asks me about [Naseem]. Just like she never asks about Fouad. Maybe she assumes that in war it’s men’s duty to disappear, whether on the battlefront, in prison or in exile.' [loc. 1893]

Some really interesting translation here, especially of rural dialect: there's a passage about an officer vetting visitors that sounds very familiar to me as a Londoner."...if the guest swallowed his T’s and said ‘A jug of wa’er,’ the conscript would tell him the officer was busy and show him the door" [loc. 1876] But I don't know enough about the Arabic language, or about regional dialects in Arabic, to appreciate this translation properly.

Fulfils the 'Arab author in translation' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.