When Hayat, a Kuwaiti woman, took out a very old gift from her lost lover, "she would feel time collapse into something other than it happened to be at that moment. She would drift outside the lines in the sand, toward a glow around something she could almost make out, was on the verge of seeing clearly. It was like galloping through water or shooting up at the sun." Hers is one of many lives illuminated in Mai Al-Nakib's The Hidden Light of Objects, a debut collection of stories strung together by the common thread of longing--sometimes for the past, sometimes for peace but mostly for the preservation of memory in all its vivid freshness.
Through the voices of teenage girls and remorseful old men, Westerners in the Middle East and Middle Easterners in the West, Al-Nakib evokes a tender world that blooms bright within war-torn deserts. Her characters' concerns are simple: first loves and awkward flirtations. Yet this ordinariness serves only to sharpen the contrast of violence that inevitably creeps into their lives. Perhaps most chilling is "Playing with Bombs," in which Nimr, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy, has just begun seeing his first girlfriend. They meet in an alley at night to kiss nervously and exchange secrets. Yet theirs is a love tainted with foreboding, as Nimr narrates the story from beyond the grave.
In the midst of tragedy, memory offers the characters escape. Objects, whether stumbled upon or carefully guarded, are the keys that allow them to unlock doors into their own glittering pasts. --Annie Atherton