The Report

A masterful novel that unfolds within a nightmarish landscape steeped in symbolism and suffused with ambiguity. At its heart lies an elusive protagonist: the report-always delayed, always out of reach. Surrounding it is the Municipality, an institution girded by fear, devouring those who approach its sacred perimeter. Presiding over it is a despotic Director, emblem of a repressive, hierarchical, and intelligence-riddled bureaucracy-his chief aide bearing the evocative name, "Amin Habib al-Rayyis," or "the President's Trusted Confidant." Within this authoritarian world, draconian decrees prohibit patients from accessing their own medical reports and forbid parking anywhere near the sanctified grounds of the institution.
We journey breathlessly alongside Nahla, through the torment of an undiagnosed affliction-one that is neither confirmed nor denied-as she awaits a cryptic medical report that never arrives, never clarifies, and never alleviates the uncertainty surrounding her possibly malignant condition.
This is a narrative shrouded in mist, casting the reader into a liminal space between allegorical dimensions and stark reality. Each symbolic gesture and character bear the weight of lived experience, until illusion blurs into illness, and the shadow of a possible cancer merges with a far more tangible malady: the fear, confinement, and repression that besiege Nahla at every level.
The novel's psychological and surrealist narrative etches five haunting dreams into our consciousness as we follow Nahla's introspective quest for salvation. In the first, she is led across a river-by Burhan, specifically. In the second, she stands atop a towering mountain encircled by clouds, her very being trapped, as a crow caws nearby. The third dream unfolds in a wrestling ring, where two giants-Burhan, who abstains from beer but condones bribery, and the autocratic Director-engage in a violent duel. Nahla, exposed in a moment of symbolic nakedness, is caught between them. In the fourth, humanity has been caged inside a zoo, while beasts roam free: people dwell in concrete pens while predators and monkeys wander the corridors, defecating on their captives from above. The final vision finds Nahla barefoot, crossing burning sands, until Burhan lifts her and carries her to the shore-only to arrive at a beach where the Director, his guards, and her husband Adham await. A monstrous wave crashes, and blame is cast upon her once more.
Nahla is repeatedly put on trial-for the transgression of living with will and desire, in defiance of municipal codes and the authoritarian control exerted by the Director over both the physical and spiritual domains of those in this luminous novel. Her entire history of resistance is summoned to the dock. Not only does the Municipality recall how, as a young woman, she slapped a man who dared grab her hand, but it subjects her to renewed violations-a fresh assault upon her existence, a new imprisonment that strips her of her humanity, even denying her the right to relieve herself.
The Report is a novel that speaks beyond its lines, where what is told is less than what is imagined, and what is narrated is dwarfed by the imaginative force it conjures in its reader's mind.
It resurrects the grandeur of the expansive, documentary-style narrative, chronicling the fraught journey of Nahla, who ultimately seizes her fate with her own hands. She chooses to transcend the curse of the report and to confront the specter of cancer-not through the machinery of the Municipality and its police apparatus, but through her own will and clarity.
- Ayman El-Semiry