The characters of this novel are searching for a different life. Some of them leave their work in the cotton factory and become sex workers in the hot springs resort, while one of them enters prison of his own accord in search of calm. A third goes to her hometown, discovering strange caves and tunnels, while a fourth chooses a refuge in A rural province, where Chinese herbs are used in traditional medicine.
These characters are intertwined in multiple emotional and physical relationships, while each of them seems like a mirror of the other, as the story of each of them begins where the previous one left off, in a fluid temporal structure.
In this novel, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, Tsun Shieh writes about the meaning of life in its relationship to love, sex, birthplace and work, and about the vanishing border between life and death, between wakefulness and sleep, in a blurry and turbulent plot full of sensual descriptions and vivid metaphors. , its aspects resonate with echoes of magical realism.
يستنتج كتاب "الأنا الواقعية والذاتية" مجيء تقدم رئيسي في المعرفة النقديّة الإنسانية تم التنبؤ به منذ وقت طويل، إنه يشرح و يصف مادة وجوهر الوعي كما تطوّر
Love's eye:
I live in the ghost of waiting for a long time, and I do not know to what extent it extends. I do not know if I experienced that deep and sincere love in an illusion or a dream, which that person showered upon me since my innocent childhood until he left me and left without any unjustified reason, and I felt at that time the despair that is followed by deprivation forever. Despite all of this, there was an echo of the voice of hope that lay deep within me, ringing in my ears, that my absent person would return, even after a while...
Written by: Sarah Al-Zarouni.
... عندما يقترن اسمي برتبتي العسكرية فهذا يعني غالبا أن الأمر يتعلق بعملي… لقد تم اختيارك لتكون ضمن فريق التحقيق الخاص لقضية " سفاح الأزقة " سيتم إنهاء إجراءات الطيران والحجوزات لقدومك لــ الطائف .
When Jack got off the train carrying his certificate from the Teacher Training Institute, his father boarded the same train and disappeared.
Haunted by his father's abandonment of him, he spends his day teaching in his small village in the morning, and befriending the village miller in the evening, trying to find out from him the secret of his father's disappearance.
The miller encourages him to participate in an adventure that takes him out of his small world and into the brothel of the neighboring city, and his favorite student tries to share this secret journey with him.
With a young man searching for his father, a teenager searching for the journey of adulthood, and the complex young relationships of the residents of a small village, Scarmita takes us on a sweet journey of loss, maturity and forgiveness.
