Raquel Says

📖 The Scoop

WINNER OF THE YEHUDA AMICHAI PRIZE"KAFKA'S HEIR, PERHAPS."There is someone behind us telling us that somewhere there exists another person in the world living a life parallel to ours; someone who feels the same things and is perhaps doing the same thing at this very moment. But what happens when two parallell lines intersect? The impossible happens, and what should not happen, happens. If soulmates do exist, and if we have the desire to find them, that doesn't mean that the meeting will make our lives easier or give us solutions. The narrator of this novel reveals to us his encounter with Raquel, his soulmate. With him we discover how two people are born in the same city, almost on the same day, marry similar people, give their children the same names, and write very similar books, without ever having seen each other or met until they reach the age of forty. An existential cataclysm, this experience only serves to move these two characters further into exile. Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) is a journey to the limits of logic. "Do you remember the poor man wearing a djellaba who would beg for money next to the school?""The one on the corner.""Two corners and the school in the middle, the black metal door.""I remember that you would run to give him a coin before they closed the door, always arriving to class last.""I wanted to sleep a little more, you were always in my dreams.""He would dance.""Do you remember the rulers they used to hit our hands?""And they would say 'met la main' ('put out your hand'), but then your hand would automatically move back when the ruler came close.""And once again, 'met la main', as if it were normal for a child to like being hit.""And we still have good memories from that school.""Who are we?""We are the people from the memory.""The past is that story that never stops changing."

Genre: Literary Criticism / Middle Eastern (fancy, right?)