The Loved Ones

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. (Dec.)