On the night that her husband and children prepare to travel, symptoms of a psychological disorder begin to appear on Mead, a photographer and newspaper archive official. A disorder that makes her see all faces as one face, the face of a bearded Greek god, and little by little, as the disorder worsens, details of the present and past events that led her to the extremely complex social maze she faces are revealed. In a narrative shrouded in mystery, the writer combines imagination with heritage, myth, fantasy, and history, to create from all of this a tight narrative text that discusses major existential and philosophical questions: What is the role of the other versus the ego? What if the hell was me? What if the world existed within the being of only one individual and everything else was an illusion?
girl..
Accordion player..
Some fanatical Germans...
boxer..
Multiple thefts...
They are the heroes of a story I have kept to retell over and over again, one of many stories, each trying to prove to me that you, your human existence, are worth it.
If you have the desire to investigate the details of this story, come with death and he will tell you a story.
The shelter of absence is a place built of words. Everyone in it belongs to the world of his imagination, and lives in a state of obsessions and doubts. A scientist who surrenders to ambiguity and hieroglyphs and loves the mercury of impermanence and uncertainty. In this shelter, we do not know whether what we read are the preparations of the goddess of talisman, or if they are the same as the preparations of others. We do not know whether to believe her or to believe in the suffering writers who create themselves with the power of language and invent worlds and selves with words.
In “The Shelter of Absence,” we read about the wreckage of events and people, and about the brewing panic of perishing cities, in stories that belong to the imagination and the grotesque, as much as they derive from the devastation that occurs in reality as material for writing.
Critic Dr. Mohamed Al-Shahat believes that the narrative of “The Shelter of Absence” builds “on constructing an imaginative journey, with successive episodes, that questions the concepts of space, time, and human existence. In doing so, it searches for the essence of human communication beyond “language” in its common sense.”
The events of this novel take place in an apartment, and this apartment is located on the third floor of a large building, and this large building is located in a poor and afflicted popular neighborhood. This poor and afflicted popular neighborhood can be found in many places in the world. It is not permissible in any way to associate it with a place. A specific, and a specific time.. and therefore it is necessary to note.
