Empty Cages
Fatma Qandil’s literary novel Empty Cages moves with quiet intent, tracing a life through memory’s fragments.
Herein, empty cages offer both release and confinement, holding a life that teeters between adventure and the mundane. After a house move, Fatma, a Middle Eastern woman in middle age, unearths a chocolate tin packed with relics: photographs, poetry scraps, and faded notes. These objects unlock a stream of recollections that are shared without being polished or heightened, delivered with steady, unflinching rhythm. She recalls family bonds, academic struggles, and the slow fade of dying parents. These shared memories invite reflection beyond cultural boundaries. Fatma’s bond with her mother, whom she cares for until cancer takes her, reveals a child’s duty to a parent, for example. The novel observes, without judgment, how siblings—especially brothers—often slip free of this weight.
Then, without pause or shift in tone, weightier confessions surface—of childhood abuse, divorce, and alcoholism. Fatma embodies liberation on her own terms—without spectacle, and without seeking exceptional status. Rich details bleed into one another; no moment demands attention over another, and what should sting often lands without being remarked upon. The prose resists urgency too, leaving the audience to make meaning where Fatma refuses to, employing their own patience and reflection.
Lyrical at times and progressing at an unwavering pace through its catalog of events, Empty Cages is a beautiful, lingering novel. Fatma’s own approach to her story seems like a dare to challenge her detachment. At every turn, she downplays her defiance of cultural taboos. She smokes, drinks, rejects marriage as destiny, and pursues poetry—not in rebellion, but in quiet insistence on her own path.
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