Najwa BarakatCritiques

Read it twice now. Meticulous detailing without giving you the unnecessary. Details matter for the main character and they should for you. Don't want to give anything away, but it's a great read.

Surreal and fascinating, with an authorial voice that asks us to question its reliability while always seeming to tunnel inward. The real and the imagined jostle elbows as the titular Mr N shares his litany of complaints and half-remembered traumas. More disorienting than funny, this slim novel offers challenging questions about how experience molds identity and the responsibilities we have to one another.

I really enjoyed reading this book despite being thoroughly confused for most of the story. I had to take a break after a particularly rough moment in the timeline, but when I came back to it it turned out I'd been through the hardest of the content already. The timeline confusion was a deliberate construct, and it was done very well and to good effect, but the whole story was disorientingly light considering how disturbing the actual content was. It worked in the end, as really the whole point of the story, and made me really want to read an actual history of the region and the violence. I wish the book had included some kind of historical note or context at the end, or reference books to move to if readers wanted more information, but that's not the point of the story and not the job of the author. Worth reading; hard to process.

Ooof, I just couldn't get into this book. It took me forever to finish just because I never felt like picking it up and when I did I would barely read 2 or 3 pages before giving up. It is a confusing tale of mental illness that jumps continuously through time and space without explanation and you don't truely understand what's going on until the epilogue. There were some striking scenes and satisfactorily surprising revelations, but overall I did not enjoy the writing and I had no interest in following the lives of the characters. Looking at other reviews many people seemed to find the story compelling and enjoyed the journey the author took you on, but for me I wish I had spent the time with a different book.

Mr. N is the ultimate in unreliable narrators, as the story slips through time and in and out of delusions. This makes it hard for the reader to extract an actual story thread, as there are no textual clues beyond the opening lines of the scene to tell you when the action takes place, or whether it's taking place in reality at all. However, Barakāt does an admirable job of pulling it together to give the reader something cohesive to hold on to at the end. In between, we get a glimpse of war-torn Lebanon and the plight of its people.

This is not the book for a reader looking for a linear narrative. However, a reader who can decipher Mister N's train of thought will be rewarded by the quality of the writing and the resolution, such as it is.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

Mister N is a well written tale that feels genuinely lived by the author in one form or another. The settings are vivid, and the interactions are believable and interesting. The title character’s (mis)adventures and internal monologue provide the promised comedies while the world’s treatment of Mister N provides the promised tragedies. The book takes a psychological dive into the lifelong effects of trauma in a way that is at least somewhat relatable to readers.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel—he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: poverty, violence and fear.

How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his “real life” of a character from one of his early novels – a vicious militiaman. Now, does the old writer need to arm himself…or just seek psychiatric help?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: And Other Stories publishes unusual and often puzzling books. This one feels a little bit like someone found Kafka's Akashic records and channeled them through a Lebanese American writer's intense psychedelic dreams.

He liked precision and hated rough estimates. The approximate was arbitrary, the arbitrary was random, the random was chaotic, and chaos was a killer. Mr. N liked to cut away the imprecise, as he did with his pencils when he sharpened them, shaving their tips into points to make their lines clear and defined. Pens? Pens were unacceptable. Pens could leak, flooding pages with smothering ink. Ink behaved like a dictator: ordering, forbidding, controlling, brooking no dissent. Lead, meanwhile, was merciful, quick to forgive mistakes. Whatever your soul was brooding over, lead would let it speak. Ink soiled the white page; lead dissolved upon the surface, exactly as pain dissolved in the act of writing…

–and–

The human ability to adapt—to things positive and negative, to plenty and scarcity, to life and death—is terrifying. I watched {her} transform day by day. She contracted within the apartment; then she expanded to fill it. She feared her pimp would find her; then she relaxed into her new situation and her new identity. … …I felt her skin expanding, her limbs lengthening, her face settling into gladness. I saw her unwinding into something more tender, like dough when it relaxes.

Mister N is a guest in a swanky hotel. Mister N's a writer...published several novels, well-received ones...whose home is Beirut with all that implies. Mister N's...not feeling himself. Mister N's been through some stuff. Mister N's older brother is the last vestige of family he has, dead father, dead mother, in fact only his old, established nemesis, his Moriarty, a man called Luqman, is visiting Mister N despite his many vociferous complaints to Mr. Andrew, the, um, concierge or owner or someone like that, that these are unwelcome and invasive occasions of great upset.

The blows to Mister N's fragile peace of mind never really stop coming. There are so many old issues that need to be put to rest. There are absurdly youthful old people acting like hormonal kids! (Not Mister N...beta blockers, don't you know, those desire-slayers, are among his meds.) Mister N witnesses a...a...hanging, certainly, though not actually a murder as Mister N tells it. Mister N rides herd on the unruly voices in his head, the ones that enable Mister N to write their stories. As I've always said, being a writer is actually the socially acceptable face of schizophrenia. And sometimes just barely that.

The blows to Mister N's reality don't stop coming. Author Barakat is not kind. In memory, in fantasy, in reality...none of these states, and they all exist in the course of Mister N's time with us, are delineated. I don't think one gains a single, solitary thing trying to tease out the "different" frames of reference in this story. It won't make passages such as this:

Our mosquitoes and other local insects have developed quite the work ethic in recent years. They toil now not only to feed themselves, but from the pleasure of causing pain, which, having tasted once, they find impossible to relinquish. Rats, mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, feral cats, pariah dogs: all of them are vicious now and liable to get drunk on the simple taste of killing, much as humans do.

...one whit more or less effective to think of them as belonging to "reality" or "fantasy" within the book's constructed world. Mister N, you see, is not in the least who he thinks he is; and, as we are all the sum of our memories, that simple fact makes Mister N a construct, a chimera of parts from we can never know where. More to the point, neither can Mister N:

My head is a train of many cars, each of them going in a different direction. All I need to do is put them back in line so they might travel in the correct direction. Is this my entire life that I have put on the wall? How old have I become now?

The only necessary answer to this question, directed from and/or to wherever one may, is "as old as my eyes, a little older than my teeth." (The Santa Claus response.) Mister N can not really answer it as phrased. Reality passes at different rates on different scales...the days drag, the years fly by...for us all, but most of all for those of disordered thinking. And to some degree, that's my beef with the read. I don't think the story itself comes out of the time-frame-hopping all the way intact. I grant that characters in this récit are all internal to Mister N, but they still jar with their sudden vanishings and dangling conversations. An itchy lack-of-closure feeling pervaded my reading experience.

Exactly how disordered Mister N's thinking is, for all that, is one of the pleasures of reading this short, powerful, frequently authorially self-referential récit all the way to the end. I recommend you do that soonest. Preorder it now!

This is really difficult for me to review. For the right reader, I can see this being a much loved work. The prose is excellent and the story is complex. In a short period of time the reader comes to realize that the eponymous Mister N is mentally ill. This creates a great deal of confusion in the narrative as it is written in first person. I did not enjoy spending 254 pages stuck inside Mister N’s brain. The back cover calls this a dark comedy and says it is “comical and tragic by turns”. I found no hints of comedy at all, just darkness. This is a sad, tragic, and depressing novel. Well written? No doubt. Just not a novel for me. As a side note on the advanced proof: the number of textual errors was awful and I hope the final version is better edited. There are frequent misspellings, missing words, and duplicated words. If I’d been enjoying the story, I probably would have overlooked them, but since I was not, each stood out like a flashing red light.

In this story, we follow the narrator's (known as Mister N) thoughts as he becomes increasingly detached from reality. N was a writer and university professor who now lives in an institution (which he thinks is a hotel). The characters in his novels are coming to life and plaguing him, leaving him uncertain where the line between fact and delusion lies. It leaves the reader similarly confused and thus better able to relate to N and all he is going through. The epilogue is shocking and left me questioning even more what I'd taken as true.

Very well done. A realistic portrayal of someone's struggle with reality against a backdrop of poverty, violence and trauma.

Verged on becoming a psychological thriller, but veered into being a meditation on the compounding effects of trauma on the psyche -- the small, hidden traumas of dysfunctional family dynamics and the wide, inescapable traumas of a war-torn society -- and our experience of reality as a story we tell ourselves. Where stories end and reality begins -- and which informs the other -- is something the writer-narrator wrestles with throughout. I am always intrigued by a story that investigates sanity, or what you could call adherence to consensus reality, from inside a mind struggling to conform; and I also enjoy stories about writer characters struggling with their writing -- this held my attention on both those counts. The prose itself was solid and in a few places astonishing, but it's challenging critiquing translated books, wondering what has truly come through and what you might be missing from the native language and context. That said, I enjoyed this book and appreciated the opportunity to read a foreign author/novel and gain exposure to a new cultural perspective.

Brilliant. I love this kind of literary fiction, with the story playing with fiction itself, blurring the lines between it and reality. Regarding the writing, it was mostly brilliant as well, though I thought it had moments of awkwardness (perhaps due to it being a translation). Also wasn't much of a fan of the epilogue.
½

Mr. N, a writer and professor, has left his house and checked into a hotel, perhaps. There’s some question as to where he is. There he writes, complains about the care, and reminisces about how his father committed suicide in front of him when Mr. N was a child. He refuses to attend his mother’s funeral and recalls in detail how she never loved him, “cruel and unfeeling as a rock,” always favoring his older brother. “She squeezed me out of her body like a turd, only to pinch her nose and turn away.”

Mr. N’s life has been punctuated by tragedy, some inherited from the war experiences of his father – a doctor. He descends into psychosis, a “mixing of fantasy and reality,” accompanied by an “inability to distinguish between the two.” A life of trauma has taken its toll. Eventually Mr. N. comes to realize he’s in a mental institution – not a hotel. He is haunted by Luqman, a protagonist from one of his novels. The novel ends with a twist, which only serves to amplify the break from reality. A fascinating novel.½

Beautifully written book by a powerful writer. Be forewarned though that this is yet another book by a writer obsessing about the meaning of writing and it’s connection to reality. The fact that the writer is Lebanese and the story takes place in Beirut adds several additional layers of metaphor, along with almost unbearable sadness and violence, expressing the reality of that city. Sometimes the metaphorical aspects of the story veers close to cliche. I also thought the ending epilogue was unnecessary and diminished the power of the story a bit. Hence four not five stars.