With your tired eyes, you watched the movements of the darkness. Was it the motion of darkness, or that of light? Mysterious and soft, tiny moving bits of blackness, you might glimpse something within that shifts, resembling clarity but not quite light, like daylight but not the sun. You tightened the cover around your body, chest, and feet, while your head lay outside the warm sphere in the infinite unknown. Life dwelled in your eyes, and the blood chambers in your forehead glowed as the ocean flowed under your clothes with gentle, calm waves after earthquakes quieted in your bones and cells. You remembered Fatima and almost thought you knew her in a land different from this. The cloak that fell from her head and shoulders that day was like this long night rising between you and her, perhaps she was the night. With your trembling hand, growing colder as you pulled it from under the cover, you tried to grasp the edge of the night and cast the darkness away, but your hands returned empty, nearly freezing and breaking like ice.

In his narratives, Ibrahim Nasrallah creates an eerie imaginary geography that erases history, identity, and time, along with the duality of reality and illusion or dreams. There, a person might have a personal history or a distinct identity, yet tragically, not even their own death. In this nightmare novel, the language erupts fragmented and tense, breaking through the pages like burning stagnant waters in a world where heroism, as understood in classic novels, seems attainable.

Publishing house: Arab Scientific Publishers/Lebanon

Number of Pages: 166

Year of publication: 2010