Upstairs, the fortune-teller Umm Mazin offers her customers cures for their physical and romantic ailments below, Saad the hairdresser attends to a dwindling number of female customers and on the second floor, the nurse Ilham dreams of her long-lost French mother to escape the grim realities she sees in the children’s ward at the hospital. By turns affectionate, wry, and darkly comic, Absent paints a moving portrait of people struggling to get by in impossible circumstances. Dalal and her neighbors try to maintain normal lives, despite the crippling effect of bombings and international sanctions resulting from the first Gulf War. People in the Middle East are just like anywhere else in the world and when someone is behaving promiscuously, they will gossip with the best of them.Absent tells the story of Dalal, a young Iraqi woman living with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her.
When talking with people about Middle-Eastern culture there is often this stigma that people are too reserved and that the culture blocks anyone from saying anything in regard to sexual matters.
More than just the humor in this line, I want to point out that this novel was originally written in Arabic and even won Best Novel of the Year at the Cairo Book Fair. Inshirah laughs: “What he needs is an hour with Fatima Al-Gurumiyya.”” More so, it is the story of a people who remember a time when kings and princes paid homage to them and they controlled large piece’s of Egypt’s land, yet are now dwindling. It is a story of a journey of Muhra, the main character, as she finds out about the bitter truth about her mother and the foreigner whom she loved.
Here we have a world where an entire people’s way of life is threatened by the ever-increasing majority who live in cities. Here is an interesting tale of a Bedouin girl living in the 19th century.
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