A special kind of anxiety grips Martin Santome after he approaches retirement age. He sees that his life has passed without him achieving anything worth mentioning. However, something changes after hiring the young woman, Abeyanda, in the office where he works, as he suddenly experiences feelings of happiness. After his life had deprived him of her for many years, since the death of his wife and his having to raise his children alone.
Through Santome's diaries over the course of an entire year, Benedetti depicts for us the life of the middle class in Uruguay, expressing with great sensitivity the loneliness and lack of communication, love, happiness, and death, in a poetic narrative that qualifies this novel to be one of the most beautiful and powerful love novels. And elegance in Latin American literature.
Salman visits the dead cities to make a documentary film about them, those cities that were symbols of ancient civilizations, before they became cities of broken columns and stone remains. But he finds there, in the house of one of the city's elders, a painting of a wounded deer, signed by his mother, "Fatima." Soon, the owner of the house presents him with possible scenarios for his film, all of which revolve around “Fatima,” and he finds himself entering a magical world and a confusing maze as he spies on the hidden faces of his mother, realizing that he only knew one face of her.
In this novel, Khairy Al-Dhahabi manipulates times and multiple voices to write about dead cities and Fatima with its many mirrors. Who is she? What is its truth? What is the secret of wishing? “If her name wasn’t Fatima”?
