A review by Sawsan Jamil Hassan for Diffah, September 22nd, 2022
In Shakespeare’s Othello, Othello presented his wife Desdemona with a handkerchief embroidered with strawberries, which ultimately led to the tragic ending. The handkerchief, which fell from her hands, was used by her adversary Iago to bring about her demise. According to Shakespeare’s narrative, an Egyptian sorceress had given the handkerchief to Othello’s mother so that her husband would remain devoted to her and not betray her. She, in turn, gave it to her son Othello to present to his wife to ensure her fidelity—and thus the handkerchief fulfilled its purpose.
In the Syrian writer Khalil al-Rez’s 2022 novel Strawberry-spotted handkerchief, the narrative, which leads the story with exceptional prominence builds upon the symbolic history that Shakespeare gave to strawberries. Originally, strawberries had a sacred meaning, seen as symbols of perfection, integrity, chastity, and virtue until the early sixteenth century. The Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, in his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, reimagined strawberries as symbols of seduction, indulgence, and carnal pleasure. The Russian writer Nikolai Gogol was the first to attribute a licentious meaning to strawberries, through his character Nozdrev in Dead Souls, followed by Ivan Turgenev in Smoke, as referenced by the high school teacher Maxim Vadimovich in al-Razz’s novel. About a century later, Shakespeare, in his approach to ideas, emotions, and the ambiguity of human experience—resisting fixed interpretations or conventional norms—allowed strawberries to carry “incomplete, open-ended, and uncertain meanings, tinged with doubt, hesitation, illusions, and misunderstandings,” without ever stripping them of the imaginative freedom he envisioned.
“Strawberry-spotted handkerchief” can be read according to this principle, with the strawberry motif recurring repeatedly, starting from the title. The narrator, a Syrian man living in Moscow, works for Moscow News in its Arabic edition, which ceased publication in 1992 and relaunched in 2009. He has a Syrian colleague, Salem, also a typesetter at the same paper. The narrator falls in love with Raya, with whom he shares an apartment alongside Abdul and his wife Sarah, who are from Azerbaijan. Raya’s husband lives in Baku and supports Abdul by broadcasting reports on cinema in Moscow for Azerbaijani television.
The story begins when the narrator finds a note from Raya on his desk, in his unlocked room, inviting him to meet in a nearby forest, alongside three strawberries on a small plate. He goes to her, and their first kiss occurs. Once Abdul becomes aware of their affair, the narrator’s imagination takes over: “I now drifted into imagining all kinds of possible violence they could inflict on Raya and me.” Unlike in Othello, this relationship could be socially categorized as adultery, yet the novel does not dwell on moralizing this theme. Instead, it builds upon Shakespeare’s symbolic handkerchief, with the narrative soaring above trivial chatter, ultimately shaping a complex character: a man whose inner world is a battleground of thoughts, values, and emotions, and who skillfully weaves stories about the people he passes or encounters, both real and imagined.
His imagination creates entire worlds and characters, with stories for everything he sees, even inanimate objects, which he invests with inner narratives: “Everything my eyes fall upon has, for me, a personal story unrelated to preconceptions; it actually happens inside me in all its vivid detail, and I can recount it to myself whenever I wish.” He is full of life, narratives, and inner stories, which he can live alongside without anyone noticing: externally, he appears as a nearly faded office worker absorbed in routine tasks, indistinguishable at his desk.
To further emphasize his withdrawn nature, when Raya travels to Baku, his imaginary journeys by train begin: “It happened that I would travel several times a day, without my journeys affecting my working hours at the newspaper, my assigned tasks, or my general daily life in Moscow.” Here he exists as a Donquixotic figure in his dreams. He eschews air travel, which would ease the hardship, claiming it “practically diminishes the noble purpose I am striving for.” At the same time, he reveals a self-punishing streak, extending his train journeys out of guilt and devotion to Raya, inventing obstacles to make them more arduous, and even multiplying trains departing simultaneously so that he could indulge in countless imaginary trials, delighting in the suffering he crafts for himself: “It pleased me, while I multiplied myself among the guilty lovers crawling from all corners of the map to Baku for Raya, to invent for myself as much unbearable trouble as I could on each train I rode.”
He imagines scenarios that increase his suffering for Raya, even after reaching Baku in his imaginary trains: “My joy in being a lover and an outcast grew with each hardship I imposed upon myself on these journeys and each painful situation I endured upon arrival.”
As the narrative progresses, Raya becomes more of a vessel for his thoughts than a true character, and he eventually loses her by the story’s end. Through this, the reader encounters a cultured, reflective narrator who is simultaneously a critic. The text is rich with cultural information, names of writers and artists, and includes critical commentary on various works. The narrator evokes Dostoevsky’s White Nights: both the dreamer in Dostoevsky and the narrator here experience profound loneliness. The narrator in A Handkerchief with Strawberries is anxious, longing for security; when encountering a black dog in his building, he feels comforted and desires to embrace it, sensing through its happy black eyes a purity of attention and affection. Unlike the Dostoevsky figure, who anthropomorphizes buildings in St. Petersburg, this narrator humanizes a doll he finds under his bed, which Raya once claimed to have seen in a dream, imbuing it with his emotions and intentions. The doll is “not merely a kind and affectionate toy, open to others, but above all highly intelligent.” Yet the spirit of both the doll and the buildings is fragile, easily disturbed by misunderstanding.
He distrusts conventional logic and prudence, while immersing himself in reflective, existential meditations and the study of human behavior. He observes others’ actions, the causes and tools of crime, and the psychological depth of humans—ever aware of the “primitive, rough, brute” within himself that could awaken unexpectedly. The narrative also gives space to the presence of Moscow, with its streets, forests, bars, restaurants, and transport networks, set during Gorbachev’s era, foreshadowing the USSR’s collapse. The depiction of space is vivid, cinematic, sometimes approaching a screenplay format, and enhanced by playful, unusual vocabulary that gives intimacy to the narration, making it feel like a story heard aloud rather than read.
In sum, “Strawberry-spotted handkerchief” presents an atypical protagonist who will linger in readers’ minds. He is a character we might encounter often in real life but overlook, yet literature here captures him with remarkable skill. The first-person narration transforms him into a self-narrating consciousness, able to speak freely, almost like a monologue, a self-confrontation, or an unreserved confession, while simultaneously orchestrating the other characters’ presence in the story, fully empowered by the narrator’s hand.
