A review by Mohammad Nasser Eldine, for Al-Akhbar, May 3rd 2025
“I look at my life from above. I feel no regret over what has passed, I miss no one, and I hope for or expect nothing to happen—except death. I’m not truly awaiting it; it’s not a waiting, for I’m certain it will come inevitably.
There are things I know I must finish, yet I foolishly postpone them—like organizing my papers, my wardrobe, and other details that would make my final moments lighter and my departure less chaotic, as if I had prepared myself in advance. That’s if it really is a journey, and not just a moment of vanishing, a bubble that bursts and leaves no trace.”
This is the first thing that comes to mind upon reading the opening chapter of Najwa Barakat’s new novel, “May vanishes” (Dar Al-Adab). One is reminded of Plato’s charming passage in the first book of “The Republic”, where Socrates asks Cephalus about old age. Cephalus replies:
“People complain when they grow old, but I find it lighter than a breeze if lived in moderation and without greed. The complaints are not about aging, but about our own nature. A wise man blends with old age as a river merges with its banks.”
It is precisely such a moderate and greedless old age that al-Sitt May lives through in her eighty-fourth year, on the ninth floor of her Beirut apartment: a life frugal in all things, starting with the people who populate the first third of the narrative:
The building’s janitor, Youssef, who handles her few needs; the housekeeper, Shamili, who visits once a week to help her wash and eat; and her twin sons in America, who provide financial support and from whom she relinquished maternal responsibility early on. She avoids emotional or social entanglements—even with the cat that Youssef introduced into her life out of pity and kindness. May grudgingly accepts it but leaves it nameless, as if to deny it even the slightest bond or acknowledgment.
The first chapter offers a full expanse for meditating on the quiet stretches of May’s life, as if one were separating from a sagging body and the void of freshness and desire to observe it:
“Filth increases with old age—it accumulates in the nose and arteries, under fingernails, between toes, in the corners of the eyes, inside the ears and behind them. That scaly, grimy crust thickens on the skin, making it look like it belongs to a fish—or a crocodile.”
And it’s as if her vision soars like a flying carpet over the city to witness its beauty, chaos, disintegration, and devastation after the August 4 explosion:
“There is so much beauty in this country—a beauty so brazen it hurts, so indecent it must have angered some god who cursed or disfigured it forever.”
It is a contemplation tinged with elegant sorrow, echoing the clarity of vision described by Cioran:
“Old age reveals the emptiness of desire and compels you to view life from the outside. What once preoccupied you now seems like a delightful absurdity—like a musical toy that’s lost its tune. When you age, you realize that consciousness is an endless burden, and the cruelest thing in life is not pain, but lucidity.”
To transition us with finesse into the more dramatic and turbulent second chapter, the author of “Mister Noon” introduces the theme of the double or shadow—centered around the presence of a mirrored self. Al-Sitt May sees a ghost in her apartment, one that defies locked doors and bolted windows, and which, by chapter’s end, becomes the unmistakable voice of her younger self. This younger May lays bare the tormented love story that led to seven years of coma:
“Some events are like cleavers—they chop our lives into fragments and make us forget what came before. Hung like carcasses, drained of blood, skinned, dismembered, their bones and remnants thrown to dogs and trash bins—they lose their identity and become anonymous chunks of flesh.”
Chapter two transports us to the painful years in the life of May Najjar, the gifted stage actress fascinated by Cocteau, Frida Kahlo, and Greek myths like Medea and Phaedra. She falls in love twice with a talentless leftist playwright who masks his mediocrity with grand slogans about art, family, and love. He offers her up to friends during a failed gambling night, forces her to have an abortion, and eventually drives her to set fire to the house in an attempt to kill him—leading her to a mental institution.
Barakat dedicates this entire chapter to the difficult themes shaping relationships between men and women, especially the contradictions of the Arab man: who preaches equality and women’s liberation while secretly longing to enslave them emotionally and domestically, and fearing their talent or professional success. Yet she also presents the other possibility—the sensitive father who is like a soft breeze compared to the lover’s cruelty:
“There are men with tender hearts who die from an overflow of love, whose gentleness shelters us like a vast tree in the sky.”
This chapter also delights with rich cultural references, subtly woven into the narrative: Racine’s play adapted from Euripides describing the forbidden love between Phaedra and her stepson Hippolytus; Cocteau’s “The Human Voice” (1931), a monologue where a woman clings to the telephone, begging a lover not to leave her; and a quote from one of Frida Kahlo’s letters to Diego Rivera—a manifesto for every betrayed woman:
“I write to tell you that I will set you free and that I will amputate you too—like my foot.”
Barakat melts these references seamlessly into the text without weighing it down.
In the final section, like the closing allegro of a symphony, Barakat hands the narrative keys to Youssef, the janitor, who becomes both narrator and witness to May’s end. He, who had not been allowed a voice before, tells us of his escape from civil war in his homeland. He offers us a rare maternal moment when May weeps on his shoulder during a visit to the devastated Beirut port.
Youssef is the final witness as May is taken from her apartment to the care facility when dementia sets in. Just before, the neglected cat receives long-overdue recognition—May names her Frida, in a tender moment that aligns the ending with late-found empathy for fragility and vulnerable beauty.
“May vanishes” is a beautifully orchestrated narrative by Najwa Barakat, weaving themes of forgetting, aging, the body, and love. For great literature is what protects us from the rot and pus that fill this world:
“I care about only one thing: that the worms of dementia don’t find their way into my mind. Everything else is acceptable. I imagine my brain a fruit destined to rot—worms multiplying at its core, gnawing from within. Millions of them working to erase all it holds. Without it, we are nothing. Empty molds without content, the thud of drums.”
