This was... not at all what I thought it would be. While the story itself is very moving and told in very beautiful words at times, it's so fragmentary and random that it was kind of hard to find a real connection with it. I have no problem with autobios that are more a random collection of memories than a linear story, but it didn't really work for me here. Suddenly there's a second wife that never even got mentioned before, Abdel in particular goes through changes in character that you can't really follow because things don't happen in any kind of order... I liked the elements of the story and the language he used to tell it, but the way he put the individual pieces together ruined it a little.