The novel demonstrates Najwa Barakat’s characteristic descriptive power, applied both to her fictional characters and to the city of Beirut in approximately 2016. Even before the port explosion of August 2020 and Lebanon’s subsequent economic collapse, we see a city fighting to survive. The garbage goes uncollected, the river runs with mud and waste, and once beautiful buildings are retrofitted with ugliness. Yet still the city grows, a home to migrants past and present who flee war, persecution, and starvation: Lebanon’s poor, Armenians, Palestinians, domestic workers, sex workers from Africa and Asia, and now refugees from neighboring Syria at the height of its civil war.

Mr. N is driven out of the shelter of his comfortable apartment into the chaos of this bewildering city, and it provides the setting for the shock he experiences on a side street when Mr. N encounters Luqman, the murderous antihero of a grim novel he himself wrote fifteen years before. How a fictional character can appear in the flesh is as much a mystery to Mr. N as it is to the reader, and we follow Mr. N’s memories, reflections, and investigations as he grasps for the truth. Suffering from psychosis and memory loss, this unreliable and inconsistent narrator begins to excavate painful stories long buried. Like Mr. N’s mind, the narrative is disjointed and fragmentary. It circles back and contradicts itself as it slowly uncovers the mystery of Luqman—and of Mr. N.

As a literary translator, I delight in the process of composing English sentences that capture as much as I can of the meaning and artistry contained in Arabic ones. As a translator of Najwa Barakat, my goal is to preserve the rich texture of her sentences, the vivid descriptions of people and of cityscapes, the willingness to explore human pain and human cruelty.

As a general rule, translating verb tenses in Arabic narrative prose can be challenging. They contain less specificity than is required by English, and it is common in Arabic to use the present tense when narrating the past. The translator must adapt these passages to equally standard forms of narration in English, while trying to preserve Arabic’s sense of immediacy, and without getting bogged down in coordinating frameworks. Verb tense in Mister N is particularly tricky to translate since the narrative jumps without warning between time frames. Episodes may be Mr. N’s present reflections, a memory from the near past or the remote, or even prose written by Mr. N, often about himself, now in the first person, now in the third. This structure mirrors the instability of Mr. N’s mind: his failure to comprehend his situation, his inability to remember critical details, his confusion about the sequence of past events. While translation always demands interpretation, the translator of Mister N must take care to avoid erasing these ambiguities in the text.