The Loved Ones

October 8, 2007
Vibrant, tortured and stubborn memories flood overlapping narratives in this fifth novel from Iraqi novelist Mamdouh, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Arabic Literature. The morose Nader leaves his wife and young son in Canada to attend to his estranged mother Suhaila, an Iraqi expatriate living in Paris. Suhaila, a charming but depressive former dancer, has fallen into a coma, and her beloved women friends hold prayerful court around her hospital bed. Nader is trapped between a childhood suffocated under Suhaila's adoration of his every bodily function and a manhood haunted by the war-torn homeland that claimed his abusive father. Suhaila's friends simultaneously blame Nader for abandoning his mother and insist that she will “come back” for her son. As the women dote on Suhaila's inert body with melodramatic urgency, the bewildered and beleaguered Nader is seduced into their awed reverence for his mother, longing for her with a fervor that eclipses thoughts of his own family. Written in exile, Mamdouh's meditation on a mother and son fighting against a lifetime of war and estrangement is as colorful as Suhaila's dancing and as enigmatic as her silent, sleeping body.

December 15, 2007
Winner of the 2004 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Arabic Literature, this is the story of a young man who leaves his family behind in Canada to visit his comatose mother, an Iraqi exile living in Paris. As his own memories of his mother rise to the surface, he hears stories of her life from her friends, who have gathered at her bedside. Mamdouh, an Iraqi exile herself, captures the longing for home and family felt by many of the characters; however, the prose is often turgidperhaps a fault of the translationand it isn't until the last third that the novel gains much-needed energy when the son reads his mother's diaries. Extensive translator's notes, including a bibliography, along with a foreword by feminist scholar Hélène Cixous, help put the novel in its cultural context. Recommend for literary collections.Alicia Korenman, Florida State Univ. Lib., Tallahassee

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2007
Written in exile from Iraq, and winner of the2004 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for the best novel in Arabic, Mamdouh writes about exile and community. Politics is not the story. In fact, there is very little story. In a Paris hospital, Suhaila Ahmad drifts in and out of consciousness, while her distraught son, Nader, visits her from Canada. The narrative switches back and forth between his memories of Baghdad and her memories, diaries, and letters. Far in the background is her revolutionary husband. All the ruminations about the past get a bit too, well, meditative, at times. What is dynamic hereis Suhaila's loving community of women friends from everywhere??Iraqi and also Lebanese, French, Swedish, Sudanese, Palestinian, and more??who talk about big ideas and also hold a hair-coloring party to lift their friend's depression. Special as it is, the family story is universal (?I wonder who does know his own mother?), andthe secrets and lies both dark and trivial.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)