K.'s Fateful Journey

This is the debut novel by Aziz Mohammed, a Saudi writer born in the 1980s. The Arabic original was published in 2017; the Chinese edition, translated by Cai Weiliang and Wang Anqi, was published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2022. The novel is narrated in the first person: K., the protagonist, has a terminal illness and his life is counting down. With almost ledger-like patience, he recounts everything that happens to him and around him during the thirty-nine weeks after diagnosis—waiting and procedures in hospitals, evasions and distance at work, silence and friction at home, the everyday exhaustion of highways and cities. K. is both patient and observer; while ill he reads Kafka, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami, and Junichiro Tanizaki, repeatedly comparing the predicaments in their works with his own situation. The narrative has no dramatic ups and downs; it advances through interior monologue, finely detailed scenes, and sustained irony, presenting a tug-of-war between despair and calm. Through the eyes of a dying man, the novel dismantles bureaucracy, workplace alienation, and social estrangement, and captures the strong self-awareness of a generation of Arab youth who grew up with the internet, as well as their sense of not fitting in with tradition and social trends. Critics have called it "the contemporary Arab Metamorphosis."