CHICAGO: Lebanese novelist Najwa Barakat’s “Mister N” depicts a modern city and its residents fighting to survive amid continuous political strife, identity politics and a divisive history. Unafraid to delve deep into profound emotions and fragmented relationships, Barakat takes readers on an unhinged journey of a man named Mr. N. Translated into English by Luke Leafgren in 2022, Barakat’s novel is vivid and fluid as reality and fantasy blend together in Beirut.
Mr. N is a failed writer who leaves his apartment and checks into a hotel in another part of town every day to escape modern-day Beirut and its buildings and towers that cause him anxiety. The hotel provides him shelter from the “poverty, violence, and fear,” that roams the streets down below. However, his neighbors are noisy and the traffic never ceases which keeps Mr. N on edge. He lives in a place where the natural world and human world co-exist but there is a disconnect between them. Like oil in water, the two worlds seem to tolerate one another but don’t blend.
Mr. N is painfully aware of himself and his surroundings, even if he cannot decipher reality from fantasy. But there are a few things he remembers, like the loveless relationship between his mother and himself when he was growing up. His brother, Sa’id, was the apple of his mother’s eye, and Mr. N and his father were secondary. But when tragedy struck in his youth, Mr. N never recovered. He disassociates himself from reality and his thoughts move from the past to the present forcing him to live within the fragments of his mind in what can sometimes make for a disorientating read.
Barakat brilliantly writes of a man whose life is playing out of chronological order in which he feels things out of context and his emotions don’t always match his reality. He associates names, colors, scents, and faces with past traumas. From the depths of war and the historical remnants of a divided city that haunt him, Mr. N can’t move forward. His life has been a journey in which he has had to tiptoe around himself and the anxiety of it has manifested into an unstable mind and body.
