A review by Ahmad al Madini, for Al-nahar, May 12 2025
I find pleasure in reading newly released novels a little after their initial debut. Often, they are treated as mere spectacles or as opportunities to report a fact, and hurried reading tends to flatten their substance through reduction. A novel worthy of its genre demands to be read more than once and from a distance. Better still if one knows nothing of its author, allowing a pure, almost unmediated relationship with the text—unburdened by its context, production circumstances, or the literary conventions it either follows or disrupts. Such reading can produce the kind of close, fruitful interpretation a thoughtful novel deserves.
This is precisely the experience that Najwa Barakat’s confident new novel May vanishes (Dar Al-Adab, 2025) compelled upon me. Her previous works had already established her narrative credentials—particularly The Bus of Good People (1997 – sic!), a novel that demonstrated her gift for weaving complex character traits, desires, social dynamics, and inner lives into a tightly compressed, poetically sensitive realist space. True novelists are those who command space, crafting within it a world so vivid that it houses a protagonist whose actions tangle with their environment in pursuit of a definite aim. When that aim is existential and tragic, what results is unmistakably literary.
We shouldn’t tire of repeating this in our attempts to understand and write about contemporary Arabic fiction, especially as the field is now overwhelmed with an abundance of output but weakened in structure, shallow in meaning, and scattered in intent. So much of it is written outside the bounds of its artistic purpose. Najwa Barakat’s novel declares its intention early, inviting us into the intimate, singular experience of its protagonist. In doing so, it sculpts her character through an existential quest that ultimately renders a panoramic vision of a collapsing world reflected in her personal unraveling. No mature, genuine novel exists without a worldview to embody.
Of course, the novel contains a story—indeed, multiple stories. And these stories construct its literary identity. A plot summary might require only a few lines in a book of 223 pages, yet remains essential to contextualize what follows. Reading with a deliberately “impure” lens—one that looks with three eyes instead of two—reveals more than surface. The narrative opens in a Beirut apartment on the ninth floor, where an 84-year-old woman lives. Behind her lies a life teeming with experiences and memories, densely lived.
Barakat employs various narrative strategies, beginning from the end—or rather, from the protagonist’s twilight years—mirroring the decline of both character and city. Four initial “vantage points” frame this descent. First, from her balcony, where Beirut becomes her external world. Second, through an inventory of the apartment: plants, furniture, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom—and the caretaker Yusuf, who performs tasks on behalf of her emigrant sons, as well as Shamili, the Sri Lankan aide who comes weekly to bathe her and clean. The third view—decisive and haunting—emerges when May turns inward and dredges up personal and familial memories, painting a portrait of her descent from past to present.
Here, existential questions swell to the surface: broad, philosophical meditations on life and being. These are partly authorial insertions, clothing the novel in intellectual depth beyond a simple account of an aging woman. The result is a weaving of interior monologue and declarative prose, at times fluid and reactive, at others disjointed and uneasy, oscillating between subject and object through memory and perception.
This framework—a multilayered staging—sets up more than just symptoms of aging. The opening’s dread and paranoia of an imagined intruder become, by the second section, an encounter with May’s younger self: a spectral voice that recounts her life as a young woman, folding story within story (mise en abyme), a technique mastered by André Gide in Paludes, and enriched here with metafictional play.
That ghostly narrator offers the “hidden side” of May: a young, talented actress in the vibrant, bohemian Beirut of the 1960s, caught in a turbulent relationship with a leftist director. Theirs is a violent, passionate affair that spirals into breakdown, culminating in May’s desperate attempt to burn him—resulting in her confinement to a psychiatric hospital. A supposed “happy ending” follows: she marries her doctor, bears twins, and later succumbs to Alzheimer’s. Her husband dies in an accident, the sons emigrate like so many other skilled Lebanese, and she remains alone, watching Beirut’s collapse from her seventh-floor window as her own body and mind deteriorate.
Barakat’s narrative ambition is clear: through one woman’s story, she reconstructs a national, social, and psychological history. The Lebanese novel has long served as a realistic chronicle of collective trauma, but rarely is the human and spatial collapse rendered so intimately and starkly. In May vanishes, fiction becomes requiem. No other Arabic novel, perhaps, so thoroughly fuses personal and collective fate, city and body. The tragedy is poetic, and the prose reflects this: wounded, intimate, marked with the scars of its narrator.
Here, Barakat collects fragments and writes with the remnants. She unites the grotesque with the sublime, beauty with decay, bringing her city and its people to a final, necessary vanishing. The shifting narrative modes—often bordering on dissonance—reflect a reality fractured beyond repair. And if the work’s stylistic mosaic sometimes lacks cohesion, it mirrors the very disintegration it narrates. Beirut, like May, is past the point of recovery.
In the evolution of the novel, pivotal moments are shaped by time, urban transformation, existential struggle, and stylistic innovation. It is at such peaks that the genre either reinvents itself or stagnates. After May vanishes, it is perhaps time for Lebanese writers—and others across the Arab world—to seek new matter and new fictions. Without this shift, they risk repeating themselves into sterility. If Najwa Barakat’s novel does nothing more than sound this alarm, then it alone would suffice. But it does far more—and proves itself necessary.