The narrator lives with a father who is a reader, who presents a program about books on one of the channels, and his relationship with his son was not strong, but books were what distracted him from him. Then, the teenager decides to commit suicide on a bridge near his house, but he fails after seeing the road, so he picks up a marble and throws it, causing a terrible traffic accident. A girl named Irene survives the accident, with whom this teenager later lives a love affair. But he also cannot escape his sense of guilt about what happened, concealing the secret that leads him later to write. But he confesses in more than one place in the novel that he writes because his father reads, and in this confession the novel opens to many questions about the relationship of reading to writing, father to son, and truth to imagination.
In these overlapping dualities, we find Mayass, the journalist and the novelist at the same time, as he is trying to take the journalistic language to another place to meet literature. The author of “From the Shadows” is keen to make us feel the secret relationship between the story and the novel. He not only tells a personal story, but also provokes us to think that what happens had roots in his father’s relationship to literature, or that what happened is more than an anecdote, a reflection of his father’s story. Yet it is true not because it actually happened, but because the narrator feels it and makes us believe it. The narrator here tries to relate the incident realistically, but he relates it to his father in a way that seems fictional. Mayyas says in one of his dialogues that he is a writer of the “why not” type, meaning that he writes without knowing what happens on the next page, and in every novel there is a kind of free association.
But the Spanish novelist is also preoccupied with the exoticism that filled his previous works, especially the “obsessed woman,” who was told by Mayas in a press interview that it was a very strange novel. His response was: How can a novel be a novel if it is not strange? But Edward Said says it falls into this world, so perhaps it must be strange. Here comes the strangeness of Mayas’ novels as if they are part of this reality, and even exist in order to ask him questions. It’s part of intimacy, too. In The Obsessed Woman, Mayas recounts the fictional worlds of a girl who works by day as a fishmonger, while studying language in the evening. Mayyas’ passion for language is evident in this novel, and perhaps it is also a passion for writing and its relationship to life and existence.
In another novel entitled “From the Shadows,” the hero observes a strange family through his presence in the closet, and from that shadow he sees details that make him form his own idea of the world. This illuminates for us many details about Mayas’ vision of the small details that raise questions about the big details and the big issues. The exoticism of Mayas stems from the simple diaries of life, perhaps this differs from Saramago’s worlds, which also tend towards exoticism sometimes, especially in his novel “Blindness” in which Saramago raises existential and political issues.
His weirdness stems from the simple diary of life
In his book “Literature and Strangeness”, Moroccan writer and critic Abdel-Fattah Kilitiou says: “Every talk about strangeness is also a talk about familiarity.” It is as if we are here to find Mias worlds that intermarry between these two worlds so that the strangeness becomes amiable. In “My True Story”, it seems that realism is strange, especially as we imagine that the crime that the teenager commits by mistake is imaginary, or that despite coming from the world of literature, he is strongly biased towards what happened to him in life, remembering only the titles of the novels that were not He reads it. It seems that the passion for writing also led the novelist to ask the question of the relationship between writing and real life and to what extent writing can be a picture of the real life of people… and also the relationship of this to reading and books, as if reading, writing and life in a very fragile tripartite relationship just as it is The relationship between a teenager and his parents. Nothing falls outside this equation that Mayas sets us against, which is to look at life as an important part of reading and writing, as if we need to read it another reading and writing another.
Mayas says in the novel about reading: “I am the one who did not read Dostoevsky, there are others, of course, many who did not read him, but I am the only one who remained in the case of not reading it. Yet I read it incredibly. To put it plainly, it is like a case of someone who has never traveled to Paris, and for this very reason, because he has never set foot in the streets of this legendary city, has very intense experiences about it and knows things about it that even those who know the city and live in it do not know.” Thus, Mayas calls for “another reading” of literature through real life and small details. “My True Story” is an attempt to pose this problem that we are still contemplating without any ready-made answer.