There are no names for the women in this book. Rather, they are just bodies. It is through the body that society recognizes them, and through it they also identify themselves. This often alienated body is the same body that deserves to be celebrated and celebrated.
By masterfully combining, with innovative writing techniques, the real and the imagined, and carelessly collapsing the boundaries between psychological realism, science fiction, comedy, horror, fantasy, and magical realism, Carmen María Machado pours out in Her Body and Other Parties her vision of the contradictory world of real women. : The beautiful, the funny, the strange, the dark, and the terrifying, alike. This contradiction is etched in their experiences and daily lives, between push and pull, independence and helplessness, to ultimately reveal the surreal meaning of being a “woman.”
After losing hope of proving the existence of the Sumakiat Library, which disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the early 1960s, one of her books appears almost out of nowhere, more than twenty kilometers away from its location and disappearance: the complete book “Al-Shawqiyyat,” and on its inner page is written “Sammaqiyat Library.” ", and a serial number was entered.
This book revives Tawfiq Al-Khadra's hope in proving the existence of the library, which has actually become an imaginary library that never existed, because everyone denied its existence in the first place. He searches for the rest of the books, traces how they reached the people he found them with, and little by little the facts of what happened on that distant day in which the library disappeared and Faris Abu Lawz was killed are revealed to him.