| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Mimi too is difficult to like, although she no doubt represents a significant portion of women leading double lives, but like Siham, her undying obsession with Layal reveals a shallowness that is difficult to admire.
How might we account for these exceedingly obsessive traits in the main protagonists? I have often wondered about Mansour’s reasons for giving these characters the singular objective of attaining Layal for most of the narrative. Aside from the fact that Layal acts as a chameleon who inflects and becomes what the women around her want her to be, aside from the fact that Mansour is able to explore the Freudian idea that love is selfish and self-centred, not to mention that what we perceive to be the object of our love is a subjective experience that is in no way inherent in the object itself, what is the thematic purpose of Layal’s unattainability and the dizzying obsession that Mimi and Siham have with her? Layal tolerates Siham because of feelings of empathy and compassion, while her tolerance for Mimi is born of her unconscious attraction to her. Outwardly she appears to be tolerating both of them due to her own obsession with ethnography and her anthropological pursuit to discover the “world of these” deviants, and yet she admits that she may be entertaining an almost “Don Juanian inclination” (page 158) towards Mimi.