Set in a tense, nightmarish world, The City of Lower Halves unfolds in a city where a group of wounded and disfigured characters—scarred both outwardly and inwardly—move through its shadowy spaces. The novel calls them “the Survivors.” The narrative is built around a distinctive project of revenge: the Survivors’ vengeance against their “tormentors,” with all the strategy, planning, and execution such an act requires, as well as the mental and physical resilience needed for revenge to be carried out and “justice” to be achieved.
In an imaginary city lying beneath a mountain, whose rooms, corridors, courtyards, and baths are carved into the mountain’s depths, the Survivors enter through a network of rituals. After undergoing arduous training, they take up residence there and await their tormentors. They put them on trial, pronounce sentences, and choose the means by which those sentences will be carried out. Thus, the victim becomes the tormentor, and the tormentor the victim. The stone city becomes a narrative space steeped, on the one hand, in violence, cries of rage, and the tears of victims, and, on the other, in dreams, rituals of purification, and the pleasures of dispensing justice.
The novel’s narrative structure requires its fictional contexts to take shape through the voices of the Survivors, in a manner reminiscent of listening sessions in psychotherapy. The city thus comes to resemble a confessional couch or a space for therapeutic listening. Each story told by a victim or a tormentor becomes the nucleus from which the novel’s inner narratives branch out. These stories may intersect, resemble one another, differ, or even contradict one another, yet the thread that binds them together remains the construction of the relationships connecting the various characters and their different roles: the city’s leaders and subordinates, its guards and huntresses, its women and men, and even its children.
Amid the city’s winding passages, caves, and doors opening onto forests and a terrifying watery abyss, the city’s records and history are written, recorded, and digitized through the voices of the Survivors: stories of burned skin, disfigured faces, bodies seared by instruments of violence, and souls submerged in the darkness of oppression, harm, and suffering. From this symbolic source, the novel draws its imagery, events, records, and expressions, constructing its distinctive narrative mask: savagery.
The City of Lower Halves is a complex journey into the worlds of savagery, where human beings become enemies of one another for trivial reasons that do not extend beyond the “lower half” of the body. The novel may readily be interpreted through gender, sociological, and human-rights perspectives, yet its greatest concern and highest ambition remain artistic and aesthetic: that which makes the novel a linguistic and artistic project capable of giving its readers literary pleasure.