Secrets of the Dissection Room Girl

Author: Jassim Mohammed Abboud

Where does the soul go? And can the souls of the dead return to speak to us and tell us their secrets? This question is what Jassim Mohammed Abboud's novel, "Secrets of the Dissection Room Girl," attempts to answer by narrating a hallucinatory psychological state and creating an illusion of the reality of the event - the return of the soul to life. Therefore, the author strives to clarify and crystallize it, a crystallization that combines reality and dream, hallucination and internal dialogue, consciousness and unconsciousness. The event is textually realized through expressive, intrinsic forms narrated by the novel's protagonist, a medical student tasked with dissecting the body of an unknown girl, on whose hand the name "Attab" was written. From the moment he uncovered her face, his life was never the same, as the girl began to haunt him every night, and he didn't know what she wanted from him. Her repeated appearance nearly drove him to madness. He began to ask himself whether what he was experiencing was merely visual hallucinations and projections of his deluded imagination, or if it was real and a factual matter. To get an answer that dispels illusion with truth, the novel's protagonist begins to search for the secrets of the dissection room girl in a series of adventures that surprise, astonish, and hold one's breath. From the atmosphere of the novel, we read: "Voltaire says: 'Man is always seeking illusions because he is too cowardly to face facts.' During my life, which is nearing twenty years, especially in recent years, I withdrew from society and began to behave very passively towards those around me in a strange way. My closest family suffered what other families, which constitute the majority of society, suffer under the difficult economic circumstances and the collapse of the societal system, which began to rapidly and severely deteriorate. Everyone was under pressure, and I preferred to seclude myself and observe from afar, focusing all my energy and attention on my studies. I was, in one way or another, selfish, and I tried my best to avoid facts and reality. Is my adherence to Attab's case my escape forward from facing facts? Can illusions be so pure and clear as to mimic reality and surpass it?!"