There are fictional characters we get to know primarily through their actions – and others where we sense that every decision has a long backstory. In Labyrinth der verwaisten Wünsche by Samer Al Najjar, Adam clearly belongs to the second group. Following him through Damascus, revolution, flight, and Vienna, one encounters not a flawless hero, but a young man whose longing for closeness repeatedly collides with the experience of loss.
A child who must learn the meaning of loss early on
Adam's story begins with a loss that predates revolution and war. His parents die in a car accident. Afterward, he grows up in his uncle's house – but the new home does not become a safe place for him. Emotional abuse, family bullying, and stressful experiences at school shape his childhood. Security remains something others seemingly possess as a matter of course, something that repeatedly eludes Adam.
These early experiences are crucial to understanding the psychological development of the fictional character Adam. The novel does not merely recount his childhood as a prelude. Memories repeatedly intrude into Adam's present. The past thus becomes something alive: it influences whom he trusts, what he seeks, and how vulnerable he remains in relationships.
The revolution as a promise of a different life
When protests begin in Syria in 2011, something fundamental changes for Adam. He joins people demanding democracy and freedom rights and participates in peaceful demonstrations. For him, however, the Syrian revolution means even more than political change. It suddenly offers him a community, a goal, and the opportunity to give meaning to his own life.
Precisely therein lies one of the novel's most interesting tensions: Adam's political commitment cannot be completely separated from his personal history. The dream of a free Syria is at the same time the hope of becoming part of a more just and reliable world himself.
In the author interview, Samer Al Najjar articulates this connection very clearly: "Adam cannot let go of this dream because his life before the revolution was meaningless." – Samer Al Najjar in an author interview with the publisher, February 2023.
When experiences don't stay behind at the border
But hope turns into persecution, war, and mortal danger. After Adam experiences the sarin gas attacks in Ghouta near Damascus in 2013, he flees to Turkey. Later, he reaches Vienna. Outwardly, the distance to the war increases – inwardly, the opposite happens. His experiences remain present.
The novel thus powerfully demonstrates why trauma and experiences of flight in literature do not begin with war and do not end with arrival in a safe country. For Adam, early attachment losses coincide with political violence, experiences of flight, and renewed personal losses. Al Najjar describes this development without reducing his protagonist to a psychological diagnosis.
Those who wish to explore this layer of the novel further will immediately arrive at the search for home and belonging. For Adam's desire for a safe place is as strong as his need for someone with whom he can stay.
Darin, Vienna, and the question of whether love can save
In Vienna, Adam receives news of the death of Darin, his cousin and childhood sweetheart. The loss hits a psyche that already has much to bear. His crisis intensifies until he attempts to take his own life and is eventually treated in a clinic. But the novel does not end Adam's story there.
A new encounter once again opens up the possibility of closeness. Adam meets a young Syrian woman. Love now appears as perhaps a last straw – though not as a romantic guarantee of healing. The crucial question remains, rather, whether a person can ever dare to trust again after so many losses.
A vulnerable hero without easy answers
Precisely for this reason, Adam remains a memorable character. He is politically idealistic yet internally unstable, full of longing yet capable of warding off intimacy. His contradictions make him believable. War trauma, childhood trauma, love, and loss do not stand side by side in this contemporary psychological novel; rather, they intertwine. Samer Al Najjar thus tells Adam's journey less as a hero's tale than as a search: for meaning, freedom, belonging, and the possibility of rising again after a breakdown.
The book is available in German language as a printed, softcover edition (ISBN 978-3-910347-08-3) and as an EPUB (ISBN 978-3-910347-16-8) in bookstores or here in the publisher's shop.
