Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakoul: A Surreal and Captivating Tale
A Book Review by Natalie Wall
An unnamed woman wakes up in a sordid basement, tied to a chair, a strange man looming over her. Following a bloody escape, she emerges from her captivity into a strange, alienating, and nightmarish town. The novel follows her journey through the streets, the people she meets, and the way she understands herself and her surroundings now she is free.
This is not a book you read for the plot, in fact plot is pretty absent throughout. Instead, what we get is an attempt to capture the mind of the narrator which is as nightmarish as her surroundings. It feels like it is trying to dramatise the feeling of the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, exploring how her experience in the basement has impacted her and how it completely changes how she relates to those around her. You can see the way her horrific experience has affected her as she thinks at multiple points there was no ‘before’ the basement, her previous self has been completely obliterated by trauma and she is tuck in a perpetual ‘now’ reeling from what happened.
The setting feels threatening for uncertain reasons, her body feels alien, her actions feel mechanical and her interactions with others are tense yet wooden, either like she’s in a hallucinatory dreamscape or like she’s just going through the motions, following a script. These two extremes often coincide which makes the novel disorientating to read.
Much of the frustration with this novel will come from the lack of plot and the fact we do not know what happened to her in that basement, who kept her there, or why. It’s a completely insular novel and the horror comes from how the narrator’s mind struggles to comprehend her own body and how it interacts with and reacts to her new surroundings. What happened to her body is a mystery and there are layers of metaphors, allusions and cryptic descriptions obscuring the truth. But again, the horror is witnessing the narrator experiencing this complete alienation from her body and it’s a testament to Abi-Nakoul’s skill that that could be rendered in prose and maintain the horror – a particularly harrowing scene in a bathtub is not for the faint of heart.
The prose is thick and you need to wade through it. Descriptions are sometimes excruciatingly detailed and you wish they would stop, wish that you could get a sense of the bigger picture of what is going on but that sense of frustration and alienation from the character and what she is doing I think is crafted to mirror her own experience. Despite the novel being written in first person we feel distant from the narrator because she seems to feel distant from herself. She makes her way through the city in a dreamlike haze, never seeming to know where she is going or why and we must endure that as readers. Needless to say, but this will not be for everyone, this novel has already garnered a big mix of reviews, but the prose is the novel.
Supplication is for fans of Missouri Williams’ relentless prose in the post-apocalyptic horror The Doloriad and the grotesque and dreamlike horror of Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot.
Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakoul
‘There, within the suddenness of the unending present, I was born.’
An unnamed narrator comes to in a basement, tied to a chair, a man looming over her. Someone has a knife.
She emerges from her captivity into a mysterious and nightmarish city, searching for meaning in her new reality.
As figures emerge from the night, some offering sanctuary, and others judgement, she moves through a fever-dream narrative of alienation, fear, and the quest for respite.
Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s powerful debut novel, Supplication, is a hallucinatory literary horror set deep in the consciousness of a woman exploring a changed and frightening world.
Product details
- Publisher : Influx Press (6 Jun. 2024)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 220 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1910312657
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