Midhat Kamal

Midhat is the protagonist and the novel’s most dynamic character. He comes from a town called Nablus in Palestine, though his father lives most of the year in Cairo and he himself was schooled at a French lycée in Constantinople. The novel opens with Midhat’s journey to France, as he embarks on a new endeavor to study medicine. Midhat is a devoted student, a curious citizen of the world, and in many ways a dreamer. This dynamism injects a certain excitement and connection between the reader and Midhat that is captures by the maintenance of the third-person limited perspective on Midhat throughout much of the novel.

The author also crafts Midhat as the bridge between two cultures: that of France and that of Palestine. He begins to assimilate into French life in Montpellier, but the process of cosmopolitanizing is undergone in earnest once he...