Dissipating the border between fiction and reality, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N is as much a traversal through the cartography of Beirut as it is one wandering the avenues of the mind. We are proud to present this the Lebanese author’s most recent release as our Book Club selection for the month of May, a singular and genre-defying look into where histories, memories, narratives, and psychologies coincide.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Mister N by Najwa Barakat, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2022
Najwa Barakat’s Mister N, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing. Traveling through the streets and modern history of Beirut, Barakat’s psychological metafiction still manages to maintain a tone both light and entertaining, enthralling the reader in its twists and turns and propelling them through its pages.
As the novel opens, our protagonist, the titular Mr. N, is writing a story about Lazarus, who has just been awoken from death. As the book progresses, however, we discover that the main narrative being written by Mr. N actually concerns his attempts to resurrect his authorial self by unpicking and then piecing together fragments of his memories, following a period of writer’s block that has lasted fifteen years. The novel regularly shifts in time, mood, and even self-referentially in its narrative point of view, but it quickly becomes clear that everything we are shown is through Mr. N’s very subjective lens. As his behaviour becomes more erratic, the reader must decide how much what he writes can be trusted and whether they should suspend their disbelief to the point where it would be possible for a character from one of his novels to appear in flesh and blood.
Much of the power and pleasure in Mister N is in its meditations on language and the act of writing, as well as the poetry within its pages. The novel is full of rich metaphor and simile, and Najwa Barakat’s study of cinema is evident in the detailed and evocative scenes she paints: the garden beneath his hotel window with its “three beautiful sisters clothed in green leaves”, which later, in the cover of pitch black night, becomes the stage for a macabre performance by his neighbours; the dirty and overcrowded streets of the refugee and migrant-filled districts where Mr. N “navigated high, dilapidated buildings, haphazardly placed, pushing against one another, tottering together, like man-made cumulus clouds locked in combat as they floated along with scents of decay from the slaughterhouses and the mountains of trash”. The potent combination of Mr. N’s poetic imagination and his illness allows the narration to glide seamlessly from the serious to the slight in the span of a sentence and then back again, reflecting a state of trauma in which the relative significance of things can be inverted, and a numbness to death and loss that can put the trivial on equal footing with the terrible. Midway through witnessing his neighbour’s suicide, for example, he becomes distracted by a mosquito and begins meditating on the best ways to get rid of it. On the one hand, such shifts and tangents contribute to the novel’s grim humour; on the other, as the novel progresses, and Mr. N grows less confident in his fiction of a comfortable hotel life and increasingly paranoid and delusional, they also reflect his inability to piece together a coherent narrative that might reveal the supposed truth of his life’s history. As he explains to one of his psychologists, “the malady lies in my fatal recalling of every detail and my brain’s refusal to take in the full picture. So here I am, not grasping realities except through successive glimpses of the horizon, momentary flashes that reveal disparate, disjointed things, before putting them back together again.”
With its universal themes of familial trauma and the search for personal understanding, and its very postmodern reflections on the art and artifice of writing, this novel could in some ways be set anywhere, and Luke Leafgren’s impeccable translation certainly makes it read as though it could have been written originally in English; yet the history of the Lebanese civil war and the current refugee crisis in the Middle East form a constant and pressing backdrop, which, along with culturally specific references to convention and cuisine, firmly situate this novel in its specific time and place. Reading Leafgren’s concise and insightful translator’s note affirms the careful choices required to make this English rendering feel so effortlessly familiar and foreign, echoing the strange marriage of clarity and confusion in Mr. N’s own narrative recollections.
There are some elements of the book that are tidily resolved, and a clear path through the narrative is eventually laid out for the reader (Mr. N quite literally puts a timeline on his wall). There is also a revelatory final twist that provides a neat framing story—that common trope of the unreliable narrator genre—with extra layers of metatextuality. Enough remains mysterious and poignant, though, to keep drawing the reader’s mind back to this novel long after its final pages have been read. One such example is the recurring motif of “10:25”—the only time that the hands of Mr. N’s clock ever seem to point to. Is this perhaps the time at which a significant event occurred in Mr N’s life, henceforth indelibly imprinted in his consciousness? Is it an intertextual and metafictional reference, perhaps to the Gospel of John: “Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me”? Or is it the arbitrary fixation of a traumatised and delusional psyche trying to create pattern and poetry in the world? Puzzles such as this create both rhythm and intrigue in the novel and provide satisfying food for thought.
While Mister N’s constant, explicit reminders of the novel’s own textuality and fictionality could work to distance the reader from the eponymous character and his plight, it in fact has almost the opposite effect: even with all his delusions, Mr. N is in many ways more vivid and authentic than many fictional characters whose perception of the world we are never invited to question, whose fictional existence is never cast into doubt, and who nevertheless provoke much less compassion and insight. Instead of feeling self-conscious or academic, the novel’s self-reflexivity instead challenges us to consider the narratives we each create to frame our experience of the world, and the friction between fact and fiction that always exists in both text and reality—it can be in life, as in “literature, that you have one foot in reality and one in the imagination, moving forward across a slender rope stretched tight between the boundaries of consciousness and unconsciousness, between absence and realization.”
Rachel Stanyon is a translator from German into English and a senior copyeditor with Asymptote. She holds a master’s in translation and in 2016 won a place in the New Books in German Emerging Translators Programme. Her first full-length non-fiction translation has recently been published with Scribe.
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