Stone of happiness

With sarcastic language, Azhar Girgis lures us to follow the life of an obscure photographer, whose goal is to live in peace and die without noise. Kamal, the photographer who carries his camera and roams the markets and ancient alleys chronicling the lives of the people and the city, finds himself one day involved with an armed gang, which shocks him and turns his chest into an arena in which the bulls of fear compete. Events progress and escalate in a dramatic way, and he brings the silencer, trying, as he does, to put a logical end to the journey of the defeated. It is a journey of torments and happiness that begins with finding a small stone among the grass in the jinn orchard in Mosul, then stopping at the Martyrs'' Bridge in Baghdad, where the face of the Tigris withers and the memory of drowning. In this novel, Girgis''s distinctive style of black comedy and the sarcastic sense of every misfortune that fate brings down on the heads of his heroes is present in this novel. . A captivating novel that pierces the wounds of memories and sews with sarcasm the bitterness of sorrow, according to disciplined aesthetics that avoid vulgarity and tautology. The sarcasm here is not intended in itself as much as it is a side effect of experiencing what happened in that strange country.