Review by Jerome Avenas, for Toute la Culture, April 29th, 2019
Published by Éditions Gallimard in the collection “Du monde entier”, the novel by Dima Wannous, a Syrian writer born in 1982, is an impressive text on the trauma of war, memory and writing. An urgent read.
A man and a young woman meet in the waiting room of a psychiatrist under the eye of Layla, the medical secretary. Sulayma and Nassim consult for anxiety disorders: anxiety, panic attacks, self-mutilation but especially “fear of fear”, insidious and vertiginous disease which is the “fear of having …

April 2019, La Viduite.
The fear of fear, the vertiginous duplication of fiction, a story that merges with a reality whose unbearable horror is then revealed. By dipping into the psyche of a disturbed woman, by the exact restitution of her obsessions and gestures, Dima Wannous manages to draw a sadly faithful portrait of contemporary Syria. With its carnal precision, “The frightened” appears like an immense novel about human fear and mechanisms of defense.

Review by Kerenn Elkaïm for Livres Hebdo, April 2019
« La mémoire, soit elle existe, soit elle n ‘existe pas. Soit tu te réconcilies avec elle, soit tu t’en détournes. » Sulayma ne parvient pas à la chasser. Elle songe à Nissim, « ce jeune homme étrange aux os protubérants. » L’héroïne le croise dans un lieu improbable, la salle d’attente de leur psy.

Review by  Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, for En Attendant Nadeau / Mediapart, published May 2018
There are subjects that force the novel to reinvent itself. As the narrator of the last book of Elias Khoury puts it, “I am writing a novel that is unlike any other, because it belongs to a literary genre that has no name and I doubt that it exists “.

Review and interview by Antoine Perraud and Faiza Zerouala for Mediapart, January 8th, 2019.
The Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat, captures the torments of refugees, their exile, their dispossession and the challenge posed to our societies, in an original and powerful epistolary novel, Courrier de nuit (Actes Sud). A serious and essential encounter.

A review by Damien Aubel, for Transfuges, December 2018
As all great epistolarians, Madame de Sevigne for example, the immense Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat knows that the art of correspondence is a metaphysical act. Here, a series of letters, with no direct link, follow each other as many variations on pain, and the exquisiteness of absence.