All things – Buthaina Al Essa | Novel

Buthaina Al Essa's novel "All Things" attempts to dismantle the individual's relationship with authority, whether this authority is represented in literature, the state, or the global system. The novel questions the usefulness of confronting the system, and whether it is possible for the individual to exist outside it at all, or if, at best, they are a gear in the very machine they try to dismantle. The novel begins with the moment "Jassem Al-Azeemi" returns to Kuwait after four years of absence to attend his father's funeral. He finds himself forced to confront a memory filled with defeats, a world without horizon, and a stolen future. This is a novel about the conflict between generations, the search for the true meaning of the word homeland, the fall of slogans, the futility of struggle, and the responsibility of existence itself, about writing as a way of knowledge, and about all the things one faces on the way to reclaim their self.