The spider

That book was honestly an absolute banger. I legit had to finish it in one seating. The novel was mostly scientific, and a little bit spiritual. It introduced the topic of reincarnation in a mind-blowing way. I haven’t read a lot of novels by Dr. Mostafa, but this one certainly compels me to read more of him.

“The novel is about a Doctor who has a patient with very weird symptoms. He tried diagnosing him but no matter how much he thought about it, he couldn’t explain the symptoms he had. When this patient doesn’t show up in the second appointment, the doctor goes to the address the patient gave him and discovers the murder of the patient’s fiancee. After taking a tour in the house he learns that his patient had a mini lab in his house and that he was apparently obsessed with his research. After going back home he coincidently finds an old newspaper that announced the theft of a radioactive material three years ago in the department where his patient was heading. He immediately realizes it was probably stolen by him himself. He then buys a radiation detector and sweeps cairo in search for this patient of his but without any luck.

The doctor then had to go to a family gathering in tanta, Egypt. On the way he has a minor accident after the radiation detector catches a signal. He follows it and finds a house in the middle of no where. He stalks the house and finds out that his patient apparently mixes chemicals together and injects himself with it then exposes his brain to radiation to stimulate it in order to experience some kind of a spiritual journey. After blowing his cover accidentally, the patient falls down and dies after spilling what seemed to be nonsense at the time: things like “I have lived a million years”. The doctor then, eager to understand what the patient experienced, did the steps he saw that man do, and went on the jounrey of experiencing his past lives; once as a slave, once as a warrior, another as a tree, even a bull. The machine woke him up every half an hour in which he would have lived no less than a hundred years. He couldn’t get enough but eventually the whole lab burned and it turned out at the end that the whole novel is the diaries of the doctor read by a police officer who found the bodies of the doctor and his patient in this place burned in the fire.”

I haven’t felt bored once throughout the whole thing. The ideas proposed was captivating and leaves in awe after finishing the book. I just didn’t like how short it was. Each plot in the book could have had a whole book building up to it but Dr. Mostafa chose to just jump to it in a line or two. There were also some kind of unsolved mysteries, which I normally don’t like but in this case it kind of let my imagination do some magic of his.

One of the best Arabic novels I’ve read, I’ll give it a 9/10