A review by Hassan Daoud, for Alquds Alarabi, April 13, 2025
The world May inhabits is exceedingly small. Her ninth-floor apartment keeps her suspended above the bustle of life below, and when she needs something, it is Yusuf, the building’s concierge, who brings it to her. Her twin sons live abroad and, through the money they send, compensate her for having given them life. Even as she reaches the age of eighty-four, neither has visited—not once—and they scarcely appear in her memories of the past. No friends, no acquaintances, no neighbors, no past to retreat into for comfort during her final days.
Even the cat that somehow found its way to her—or was perhaps foisted upon her—remains exiled behind a locked door on the balcony, punished for arriving. She leaves it unnamed, a gesture of disavowal and emotional distance. So, what can May possibly recount in the 126 pages of Najwa Barakat’s May vanishes, when nothing happens but the silence of an empty space, monotonous days, and imagined sounds from some untraceable elsewhere? And yet, we find ourselves riveted by these sparse, repetitive events—rendered as if they were intimate secrets slowly unfolding.
May makes no complaints, voices no bitterness about being left alone. Despite the natural urge of the elderly to lament, she maintains a stubborn pride and detachment. She speaks to no one—her monologue is addressed to an absence. There’s no dialogue, not even a fragment of a remembered conversation with her sons. Nor does she grow close to Yusuf, despite his continued assistance, or to Chamili, the Sri Lankan caregiver whose role shifts from housekeeping to tending to May herself as her body begins to fail.
May narrates the first half of the novel. In the second part, we remain within her story—but here, she speaks to her future self, to the eighty-four-year-old woman she has become. “Oh May…” she begins. At first, this shift in narrative voice seems like another symptom of her dementia, a continuation of the hallucinated voices from earlier. But soon it becomes clear that the younger May is now reclaiming the chapters omitted from her present self’s account—a return to her youth to tell what was once left untold.
It is the beginning of life—of young womanhood. She discovers her passion for acting, then tumbles into a violent love affair that she rises from only to fall again. She reflects deeply, philosophizing her experiences to the point of reinvention. “Acting is not about dissolving into someone else or a character foreign to you,” she muses. “Characters are your own possible selves, shaped by different circumstances.” Or when she hears a voice on the phone: “There was something off. It had no distinct tone, as if caught between two musical notes, stuck between two states.”
Barakat’s writing, with its rich descriptive style and philosophical undertones, edges into poetry. Her prose invites the reader to underline sentences in agreement and awe. In this second section, the novel loops back to where most stories would begin: the early years, before the undoing. But Barakat doesn’t merely start at the end—she amplifies the sense of injustice. The tragedies of May’s youth become even more painful when seen through the lens of her desolate old age, as if we, the readers, are walking backward through a life unraveling.
The third and final chapter is told by Yusuf, who, until now, has remained a background figure. May rewards him for his quiet devotion by making him the sole witness to her final disappearance. She also redeems the cat, giving it—at last—a name, and keeping it close in the final two days of their shared fate.