Amid the emptiness of the modern world, the most intense stories about human aspects come from the most unsuspected places, from those spaces in which the human being suffers from submission and alienation. Because only in the necessary rebellion, in the critical notion of everything that surrounds authoritarianism or violence, can it end up awakening the best of who we are, by direct contrast with the fatality of a destiny without the tricks or triviality of the world. accommodated in the individualistic navel of growth.
The embers of the Hussein dictatorship still glow in an Iraqi society that is still unstable, because certainly the problems in the area extend from practically remote Mesopotamia. Hence, this novel by the Iraqi writer exiled in Spain Muhsin Al-Ramli delves into sensations rather than explicit political manifestations about a social status in his country that is not so far from the times of Hussein to the present.
The plot itself leads us to a passionate story of friendship, with real foundations, between Ibrahim, Tarek and Abdulá. The childhood of the three composes a mosaic of that unattainable happiness of children raised in times of conflict. And that trace of indissoluble friendship moves history when they are already adults in a country that is still mired in the same foundations on the moving lands of confrontation.
Tarek has managed to find his place in that Iraqi society and from his most comfortable position he gets a good job for Ibrahim. But what seemed like a good beginning soon ends as a macabre ending that takes away the man Ibrahim and his indelible memory for a Tarek who will investigate endlessly to find out the reasons for that terrible death in the president's own gardens.
With some notes of surrealism that is supposed to face the most evil tragedy, around the ideas of the third friend, Abdulá, we enter a story of extremes, of opposite poles between friendship and hatred, between fatality and the vague idea of a possible overcoming of all conflicts from the more lucid awareness, for better or for worse.
You can now buy the novel The President's Gardens, the new book by Muhsin Al-Ramli, here: