Absent

by Betool Khedairi

Book Overview

Absent tells the story of Dalal, a young Iraqi woman living with the childless aunt and uncle who raised her. Dalal and her neighbors try to maintain normal lives, despite the crippling effect of bombings and international sanctions resulting from the first Gulf War. By turns affectionate, wry, and darkly comic, Absent paints a moving portrait of people struggling to get by in impossible circumstances. Upstairs, the fortune-teller Umm Mazin offers...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9774249631
• ISBN13: 9789774249631
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Absent

i spent a lot of time looking for an Iraqi novel, set in Iraq, written by an Iraqi and was not just about war, death, torture and misery. This book gave an interesting and fair account of Iraq during the '90's. I found the normalcy she described refreshing and reflected the times i lived in. The novel is written in a way that it gives its reader a sense that the author had a collection of short stories that she found could be woven together in a clever way. I did not give it a 5 star rating for several reasons. Some of the historical facts are inaccurate; the inaccuracy was in sequence of events rather than describing the events themselves. I also had a sense that the author was afraid to put in writing how people felt about the conditions they found themselves in and the mass murders that were happening-the rumours that were usually truths. No opinions are given about saddam, the Kuwaiti invasion or the war. her characters did express some opinions about the sanctions, however. Why? are we still afraid to say anything negative about Saddam even now? The author does live in Jordan...