CHICAGO: A coming of age story that spans four decades of friendship between three young boys in Surra, Kuwait, by celebrated Kuwaiti novelist and winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Saud Alsanousi, “Mama Hissa’s Mice” follows Katkout, Fahd, and Sadiq through friendship, family drama, one war after another, and sectarian strife that shapes their futures and the future of Kuwait.
Moving between the past and the present, readers meet Katkout after he regains consciousness near the Gamal Abdel Nasser Park in Rawda, Kuwait. His friends have disappeared and his car has been damaged in an apparent attack. Unable to recollect the last events before falling unconscious, but feeling a sense of doom in his chest, he gets into his car to find Fahd and Sadiq. As he drives through the Kuwait of his youth, he notices the changes to his childhood home are more than physical, as childhood memories replay in his mind recalling his past, his country’s past, and the friendships that emerged as a result.
Alsanousi explores twenty-first century Kuwait through his young characters, pacing his novel with incredible detail, from the diverse neighborhoods of Indian restaurants, Iranian grocers, Syrian teachers, Pakistani barbers and Egyptian butchers, to his neighbors who are from different religious sects and ethnic backgrounds.
His characters span lifetimes of history from around the Arab world, from Mama Hissa, whose God-fearing wisdom, warnings, loves and hates follow the politics of the Arab world, to Katkout’s own understanding of politics as his life begins during the Iran-Iraq war and moves into the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq in 1991, and eventually into his liberated country — one he no longer recognizes as he moves into adulthood.
Alsanousi paints a picture in which tragedy strikes even the most stubborn of hearts and no matter how disappointed one is with the outcome of their lives, everyone adapts and moves forward. Alsanousi’s characters find themselves pushed to their limits, politically, socially, religiously and morally, as they move through life in a country that transforms itself and them.
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