What We Are Reading Today: ‘And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer'
Author: Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman captures the unraveling of a mind with devastating tenderness in his novella 'And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer.'
This spare yet monumental novella, published in 2016, traces dementia's heartbreak through intimate dialogues between a grandfather and grandson. Its power lies not in tragedy, but in love's fierce endurance against oblivion.
Grandpa is trapped in a shrinking mental town square. He navigates fragmented conversations with grandson Noah (whom he refers to as Noahnoah), clutches vanishing memories, and wrestles with unspoken tensions with his son, Ted. All while preparing for the final goodbye — to others and himself.
The shrinking square is dementia's cruel architecture made visceral. Yet within his exchanges with his grandson, luminous defiance shines. Gentle jokes. Shared secrets. Proof that love outruns oblivion.
Backman's triumph is avoiding sentimentality. No manipulative tears here, just raw honesty: Grandpa's panic when words fail, Ted's helpless anger, Noahnoah's childhood wisdom becoming the family's compass. Generational bonds offer lifelines. Grandpa lives in the stories, not his head.
The resonance is universal. Readers who are familiar with dementia's path will recognize the misplaced keys, the names that vanish, the sudden foreignness of familiar rooms. Backman transforms personal pain into collective catharsis.
A minor flaw surfaces though: Ted's perspective aches for deeper exploration. His pain lingers tantalizingly unresolved.
My final verdict is that one must devour this in one sitting. Tissues mandatory. For anyone who loves, or has loved, someone slipping away, this story can become an anchor.
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Arab News
2 days ago
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer'
Author: Fredrik Backman Fredrik Backman captures the unraveling of a mind with devastating tenderness in his novella 'And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer.' This spare yet monumental novella, published in 2016, traces dementia's heartbreak through intimate dialogues between a grandfather and grandson. Its power lies not in tragedy, but in love's fierce endurance against oblivion. Grandpa is trapped in a shrinking mental town square. He navigates fragmented conversations with grandson Noah (whom he refers to as Noahnoah), clutches vanishing memories, and wrestles with unspoken tensions with his son, Ted. All while preparing for the final goodbye — to others and himself. The shrinking square is dementia's cruel architecture made visceral. Yet within his exchanges with his grandson, luminous defiance shines. Gentle jokes. Shared secrets. Proof that love outruns oblivion. Backman's triumph is avoiding sentimentality. No manipulative tears here, just raw honesty: Grandpa's panic when words fail, Ted's helpless anger, Noahnoah's childhood wisdom becoming the family's compass. Generational bonds offer lifelines. Grandpa lives in the stories, not his head. The resonance is universal. Readers who are familiar with dementia's path will recognize the misplaced keys, the names that vanish, the sudden foreignness of familiar rooms. Backman transforms personal pain into collective catharsis. A minor flaw surfaces though: Ted's perspective aches for deeper exploration. His pain lingers tantalizingly unresolved. My final verdict is that one must devour this in one sitting. Tissues mandatory. For anyone who loves, or has loved, someone slipping away, this story can become an anchor.
Asharq Al-Awsat
4 days ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Three Rivers, One Bridge: Mahfouz's Last Dreams Revisited
With refreshing honesty, the Libyan British novelist Hisham Matar begins his translation of Naguib Mahfouz's last dreams with a confession. During their only meeting in the 1990s, Matar asked Mahfouz how he viewed writers who write in a language other than their mother tongue. The question reflected the concerns of a young writer born in America, raised partly in Cairo, and later sent to a British boarding school under a false identity to evade persecution by Gaddafi's regime, which had disappeared his dissident father. Naguib Mahfouz on the balcony of his café overlooking Tahrir Square in Cairo, 1988. (AFP) Mahfouz's reply was as concise and sharp as his prose: "You belong to the language you write in." Yet Matar admits that, in later recollections of this exchange, he often caught himself embellishing Mahfouz's words, adding an unspoken elaboration: "Every language is its own river, with its own terrain and ecology, its own banks and tides, its own source and destinations where it empties, and therefore, every writer who writes in that language must swim in its river." In this sense, I Found Myself... The Last Dreams, published by Penguin's Viking last week, attempts to be a bridge between three rivers: the Arabic in which Mahfouz wrote his original text, the English into which Matar translated it, and the visual language of the American photographer Diana Matar; the translator's wife whose images of Cairo are interspersed throughout the book. No easy task. Mahfouz's translations have often sparked debate—whether over inaccuracies, neglected context, or occasional editorial interference. A touch of this affects Matar's attempt without ruining it. For instance, in translating Dream 211, where Mahfouz finds himself facing Saad Zaghloul, leader of the 1919 revolution, alongside "Umm al-Masriyyin" (Mother of the Egyptians)—a title referring to Zaghloul's wife, Safiya—Matar misinterprets the epithet as a symbolic allusion to Egypt itself, rendering it "Mother Egypt." Beyond this, however, the first published translation by Pulitzer-winning Matar flows smoothly, matching the simplicity of his project's origin story: it began one morning over coffee at the kitchen table, where he translated a few dreams for his wife, only to find himself having done dozens—eventually deciding to publish them as his first major translation. The images complement the dreamlike atmosphere without attempting to directly translate any of them. (Courtesy of Diana Matar) Perhaps the concise, economical language of Mahfouz's final dreams made the task easier. Between dreams, Diana Matar's photographs of Cairo—Mahfouz's city and muse—appear shrouded in shadows, dust, and fleeting impressions, sometimes ghostly in detail, complementing the dreamscapes without directly illustrating them. Here, she joins Mahfouz in her love for Cairo, which became her "muse" after accompanying her husband to that summer meeting with the Arab world's sole Nobel laureate in literature. Relying on black-and-white imagery and abstraction where possible, Diana seems to bridge the temporal gap between her Cairo and Mahfouz's. Diana Matar took most of the book's photographs between the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Courtesy of Diana Matar) In his introduction's closing lines, Hisham Matar imagines Mahfouz flipping through the translation and remarking, in his trademark brevity: "Of course." But perhaps closer to the truth is that he would repeat his original verdict: "You belong to the language you write in." Perhaps we must accept that translation—not just of this book, but in general—is a bridge, not a mirror. And that is enough.
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A US Judge Halts the Deportation of the Egyptian Family of the Boulder Firebombing Suspect
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the government to immediately halt deportation proceedings against the family of a man charged in the firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, to ensure the protection of the family's constitutional rights. US District Judge Gordon P. Gallagher granted a request from the wife and five children of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who are Egyptian, to block their deportation. US immigration officials took the family into custody Tuesday, The Associated Press said. Soliman, 45, has been charged with a federal hate crime and state counts of attempted murder in Sunday's attack in downtown Boulder. Witnesses say he threw two Molotov cocktails at a group demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, and authorities say he confessed to the attack in custody. His family members have not been charged. 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'Just like her criminal husband, she and her children are here illegally and are rightfully in ICE custody for removal as a result,' she said in a statement. Witnesses describe attack at vigil Around 200 people squeezed into the local Jewish Community Center on Wednesday evening for a vigil that featured prayer, songs, a short speech by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and emotional testimony from a victim and witnesses to the attack. Rachelle Halpern, who has been walking with the group since 2023, said she remembers thinking it was strange to see a man with a canister looking like he was going to spray pesticide on the grass. Then she heard a crash and screams and saw flames around her feet. 'A woman stood one foot behind me, engulfed in flames from head to toe, lying on the ground with her husband," she said. "People immediately, three or four men immediately rushed to her to smother the flames.' Her description prompted murmurs from the audience members. One woman's head dropped into her hands. 'I heard a loud noise, and the back of my legs burning, and don't remember those next few moments,' said a victim, who didn't want to be identified and spoke off camera, over the event's speakers. 'Even as I was watching it unfold before my eyes, even then, it didn't seem real.' Defendant's family investigated Soliman's wife, Hayam El Gamal, a 17-year-old daughter, two minor sons and two minor daughters all are Egyptian citizens, according to El Gamal's lawsuit. They were being held at an immigration detention center in Texas, Lee said. 'We are investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it,' Noem said in a statement. Noem also said federal authorities would immediately crack down on people who overstay their visas, following the Boulder attack. Soliman told authorities that no one, including his family, knew about his planned attack, according to court documents. El Gamal said she was 'shocked' to learn her husband had been arrested in the attack, according to her lawsuit. Victims increase to 15 people and a dog Earlier Wednesday, authorities raised the number of people injured in the attack to 15 from 12, plus a dog. Boulder County officials said in a news release that the victims include eight women and seven men ranging in age from 25 to 88. Details about how the victims were impacted would be explained in criminal charges set to be filed Thursday, according to Boulder County District Attorney's office spokesperson Shannon Carbone. Soliman had planned to kill all of the roughly 20 participants in Sunday's demonstration at the popular Pearl Street pedestrian mall, but he threw just two of his 18 Molotov cocktails while yelling 'Free Palestine,' police said. Soliman didn't carry out his full plan 'because he got scared and had never hurt anyone before,' police wrote in an affidavit. According to an FBI affidavit, Soliman told police he was driven by a desire 'to kill all Zionist people' — a reference to the movement to establish and protect a Jewish state in Israel. Authorities said he expressed no remorse about the attack. The family's immigration status Before moving to Colorado Springs three years ago, Soliman spent 17 years in Kuwait, according to court documents. Soliman arrived in the US in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023, McLaughlin said in a post on X. She said Soliman filed for asylum in September 2022 and was granted a work authorization in March 2023, but that has also expired. Hundreds of thousands of people overstay their visas each year in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security reports. Soliman's wife is a network engineer and has a pending EB-2 visa, which is available to professionals with advanced degrees, the suit said. She and her children all are listed as dependents on Soliman's asylum application. The case against Soliman Soliman told authorities that he had been planning the attack for a year, the affidavit said. Soliman is being held in a county jail on a $10 million cash bond and is scheduled to make an appearance in state court on Thursday. His attorney, Kathryn Herold, declined to comment after a state court hearing Monday. Public defenders' policy prohibits speaking to the media. The attack unfolded against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas war, which has contributed to a spike in antisemitic violence in the United States. It happened at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot and barely a week after a man who also yelled 'Free Palestine' was charged with fatally shooting two Israeli Embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington.
