What Does a Car Bomb Explosion Feel Like?
The simile chosen by the author to convey the feeling of a car bomb going off in the distance may not be quite what one expects:
“Their city had yet to experience any major fighting, just some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in one’s chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts”
The Siren in the Cell Phone
For refugees displaced from their country and looking for a new home, mobile phone technology is like magic in comparison to the experience of those displaced before. But magic is both dark and light and the wise man knows the difference, even if he may abide by it:
“Saeed partly resisted the pull of the phone. He found the antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing, as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food, stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and sick”
When Do They Not?
A visit to the office of a dentist turns out to be rather something much less rooted in the reality of geopolitics and more within the realm of metaphysics. As a result, what might be a menacing simile in another story actually lends the scene a more mundane quality:
“The room was gloomy and the dentist’s chair and tools resembled a torture station.”
Magical Realism
The novel belongs to a genre in which realistic stories are infused with inexplicable events that can only be attributed to some preternatural agency. Inside that dentist’s office is a “black door.” This is the device by which metaphysics meets geopolitics:
“It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit”
“how little it took to make a man into meat”
Immediately upon which, the author intrudes into the mind of the character who knows metaphor to actually be a literal truth to supply just a partial, incomplete list of those “little” things:
“the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough.”
