A review for Almayadeen by Ghinwa Fedda, July 5th, 2022
The Syrian writer Khalil El-Rez (1956) creates, through his novel Strawberry spotted handkerchief, recently published by Difaf–Ikhtilaf, a spellbinding world built on stories that beget other stories, and tales that unfold endlessly. The narrative begins in the voice of the protagonist, a dreamy young Syrian man living in the Russian capital among a group of Arabs and Azeris who have come to work. He works as a writer for Moscow News in the 1980s. And through his opening line — “The door to my room didn’t have a lock…” — we think we’re about to enter an exposed, perhaps unreal world, one that might collapse and dissolve beside a table crowded with books, a scrap of paper, and three strawberries. Yet we quickly discover that this young man from Raqqa is, on the contrary, brimming with secrets. He has lived in the capital for some time, and his mind seems deeply aware of its own internal conflicts, continually generating inner dialogues that may evolve into a complete, living world woven from imaginings—presented through a magical rendering of his alienation and his sensitivity to the smallest details, details that can swell into visions revealing his ability to exist in more than one place at the same moment.
The young man soon becomes part of the community. Among the group of Azeris, he meets Raya, and before long he falls in love with her. Her qualities captivate him, and he takes this love farther than anything he has known before: he tracks her thoughts, predicts her reactions, and spends hours on a seat or on a train observing the strange pull she exerts on him. He is bewildered, for he senses that his unexpected relationship with her may give her an opportunity to settle accounts with her husband, a man of influence in Baku. Yet his feelings toward her are fresh and singular. Here we encounter a unique kind of love — a love that blazes despite great distances, burns strangely despite the short span of their acquaintance, and surges into overwhelming emotions that make him doubt what is happening to him. Here is a lover who tastes a sweet kind of sorrow even as he suffers an indescribable anguish. This fuels a storm of hallucinations, making him susceptible to being swept along by their possibilities.
The author scatters stories like a traveler tossing precious pearls along his path, blending them with rich literary nourishment. In his conversations with Raya, he might summon the tale of the death of the Azerbaijani mystic Imadaddin Nasimi, highlighting the contrast in how two distant cultures receive stories — a contrast that reflects the act of reading itself. Every reader casts their own psychological and personal shadows over the text. The novel pursues this theme again in its later conversations about the symbolism of Desdemona’s handkerchief in Shakespeare’s Othello. The narrator senses the brutality of Nasimi’s killers, while Raya sees the story as a cultural blend between two civilizations. And it doesn’t stop there: dream-like literary sequences pour in, infused with the spirit of Russian literature. After long inner monologues, he imagines what might happen after “Abdul” conveys the truth of the affair to Raya’s husband, echoing Iago’s role in the famous play:
“I wasn’t at all sure whether Dostoyevsky’s White Nights could do anything about the sizzling oil in the pan, nor was there any need for me to pick it up and plunge into reading it…”
Thus he keeps repeating to himself, “May the Lord keep us… may the Lord keep us.”
The young man’s life blends with his emotions and with the worlds of those around him. His past experiences mingle with the life of someone searching for a private world, revealing his torments — first in facing himself, then in confronting the external world. We are thus presented with two clashing worlds: his inner self, nourished by the fire of its own conflicts, and an outer world pressing on him, preventing him from silencing his narrative chatter and making him unable to stop it or erase the presence of the external world within it. We may find him lost in a love triangle — between the logic of his feelings and his simultaneous inability to give up the woman he loves. This becomes clear in the scene where he meets Raya and her husband together. We witness the uniqueness of his world, woven of hesitation, doubt, and lost confidence — all mirrored in his regression to childhood while speaking about his family in Raqqa, recalling the hardships of life there, the recurring dust storms, and the swims in the Euphrates that never happened — all part of a search for healing, comfort, and inner peace.
Symbols sway and grow throughout the novel’s details. The young man meets a girl named Nonna by chance, a coincidence that seems perfectly ordinary. He tells her about his love for Raya, and she becomes drawn into the world of his imaginings. She is fascinated by his carrying a doll he speaks to repeatedly — conversations that reveal the depth of his conflict with the world and with himself:
“I believe it is not at all necessary, for a person’s life to unfold inside you, that this person exist or even be capable of existing anywhere.”
Weeks later we find him in the home of Nonna’s grandmother, among her friends and relatives. Here the most beautiful scenes unfold, with conversations led by the teacher Maksim Vadimich about Desdemona’s handkerchief and the strawberry motif that Nonna speaks of obsessively. The conversations return to the important role the handkerchief played in the history of the strawberry: before Shakespeare, it symbolized perfection, uprightness, and chastity. It appeared in the backgrounds of sacred paintings and in some religious books. Later, its meaning turned licentious in Gogol’s Dead Souls, and likewise in Turgenev’s Smoke. The group discusses the turning point Shakespeare introduced by choosing the strawberry motif for Desdemona’s handkerchief, revealing the tension between two connotations: perfection and chastity on one side, sensuality on the other. Shakespeare seems not to have wished the fruit to carry a single fixed meaning, but rather to allow it open and incomplete significations that shift depending on who holds the handkerchief. The same applies to our protagonist, and to the novel itself: we ultimately face multiple possible scenarios — stories that cannot be told definitively or resolved, but must be lived in all their detail.
In this sense, the novel resembles the paintings, poems, and plays that refuse to flatter prevailing tastes, and that leave us, in the final scene, wondering with pleasure: Did all of this truly happen?
“At seven o’clock on Wednesday evening, I was, inside myself, strolling with Nonna in the botanical garden, eating stuffed grape leaves with Raya in her friend Anoush’s apartment, and thinking about fixing my broken bicycle at the repair shop so I could ride it with the doll. The weather was so beautiful that evening.
