Mama Hissa's Mice

This is a book of many parts: an imagined near future where Kuwait has been torn apart by sectarian violence, flashbacks to the narrator Katkout's childhood in the 90s, all interspersed with excerpts from a novel that Katkout is on the verge of publishing.

Mama Hissa's Mice is one of those instances where I'm fully prepared to admit that it may not be the book, that it's me who is at fault here. I simply lack the familiarity with either Kuwaiti or Arab culture or history to understand a lot of necessary context, and this may be a novel that works better for those with more knowledge. But that cultural opacity, coupled with a large cast of characters that I struggled to tell apart, some weird treatment of the women characters (an awful show more lot of them seem to have Very Symbolic bouts of illness: blindness, cancer, miscarriages, timely deaths), and the lumpen pacing that resulted from the shifting back and forth between the novel and the novel-within-a-novel, meant that I bounced off this book pretty hard. show less

I read about 20% of this book before deciding that life's too short to struggle with books I'm finding difficult. While I quite liked the story and characters, particularly Mama Hissa and her sense of humour, I don't know, or want to know, too much about the subject matter. If you manage to finish it, you're a braver wo/man than me.