Since the election, I've stopped reading the print newspaper in the morning. I can't take it in the early morning quiet. I inch into the news by degrees, via Twitter, at intervals throughout the day. I also miss a lot.
I haven't read much fiction in recent years, so, in the void left by the paper, I resolved to take a tour of the world through fiction. I thought I'd start with Najuib Mahfouz. But somehow along the way Amazon caught me with Absent by Betool Khedairi, a novel set in Baghdad during the sanctions period in the wake of the first Gulf War. It's exactly what I wanted -- a day-by-day of life elsewhere. It's grown on me by degrees. It's magnificent.
It's one of those quiet and apparently plotless novels, built encounter by encounter, vignette by vignette, though it's plainly trending somewhere. The "quiet" is quiet desperation. People are slowly starving, or decaying for want of medicine or sanitation or employment (though everyone finds some way to scrape some kind of living). The backdrop is adults' memories of the Days of Plenty, the period before the blockade, and the first Gulf War, and the Iraq-Iran war -- when children going to school had pencils and uniforms, and crosswalks were repainted at intervals, and refrigerators had food in them and stayed on all day.
