Nour Abi-Nakhoul is a Montreal-based novelist whose recent novel, Supplication, has garnered attention for its inventive style, which blends first-person stream of consciousness narration with supernatural horror devices. I sat down with her to discuss the recent UK release of the novel, writing at the intersection of religious allegory and body horror, and the way that the search for meaning has the dual potential to both enrich and undermine our sense of control of our lives.
Who or what are your main sources of inspiration as a writer?
For this book specifically, a few authors were very inspirational for me. The first is Clarice Lispector, especially her book The Passion According to G.H. And then, the writer Ingeborg Bachmann. She was an Austrian writer, and she has one novel called Malina. Both of those books were very influential for me. Each book is really interested in the interiority of its protagonists, and of reflecting that interiority in a raw, sincere way. Both Lispector and Bachmann are invested in reflecting the inner workings of their narrators’ consciousness, but without trying to filter that consciousness to make it more intelligible to the reader. Another really important influence for me was the musician Bladee, my favourite artist. His lyrics often sound obscure and almost nonsensical at first listen, because they operate to his own personal logic; he doesn’t filter his consciousness for accessibility, and instead communicates his ideas and feelings exactly as they exist to him, which can be very emotionally powerful for the listener once it clicks.
Can you comment on the way that your identity informs your vocation as a writer? Either as a woman or as a Canadian.
I think that’s a difficult question for me to answer. Obviously, my identity informs all of the work and all of the writing that I produce. But I think from my own perspective it’s kind of difficult to see how that works out. I think that an outside observer might be able to determine that better than I can, since I’m working from within my own mind and from my own position.
I’ve seen Supplication referred to as a horror novel. I wonder if you agree with that classification.
I definitely do use horror devices and surrealist devices in the book. And yet, I think Supplication is more of a literary fiction novel than a horror novel. That said, there are definitely horror elements within the text.
What drew you to write Supplication in the horror genre?
I was really interested in horror as a genre when I was writing this book. I was watching a lot of different horror films and reading horror literature as well. I think that horror and surrealism can be valuable devices for conveying different ideas to readers because of how viscerally they operate. They provoke visceral, immediate responses in readers. And because of the reactions that people have to horror, it can be a really interesting way of communicating ideas. It really gets down to an emotional, raw level.
Did you have a specific feeling in mind when you began writing the novel? Either a feeling that you personally were feeling or one that you wanted your readers to feel?
I think that the desperate search for meaning was the base feeling that the book came out of. The protagonist’s journey is underlined by this desperate search for meaning that she undertakes. She undergoes an extreme experience at the beginning of the novel, and the rest of the novel details her attempt to restructure the world in the wake of that experience, as well as her attempt to impose some grand system of meaning on her reality. And obviously, in the book, the protagonist and narrator is having particularly extreme experiences. They’re not normal. And so, it’s a really extreme example of this search for meaning, but I think everyone can identify with really desperately searching for some kind of meaning to impose upon their life, to give some kind of structure for how they exist within the world.
Do you think that we can read some sort of straightforward allegory—political, religious, or otherwise—into that search for meaning?
I didn’t have any intention for the search for meaning to be straightforwardly allegorical. Obviously, there’s a lot of Christian and religious symbolism within the book, and you can read a religious allegory into it if you’re looking for that. But that sort of structure of the narrative, of the protagonist looking for meaning, is the most basic narrative structure. You can trace it through any story in existence. So, it really depends on what the reader is coming into the book looking for. I think they can see it as an allegory for a number of different things: the search for religious meaning, violence against women, different political struggles. You can really read a lot of different things into it.
The novel contains a good deal of religious imagery—of sainthood, of the bliss associated with asceticism, starvation, and physical torture, for example. Are we to read this as a critique of the logic of martyrdom, a continuation of that logic, or in some third way?
The narrator definitely sees things in those kind of terms, and thus that’s how she describes her reality, through that imagery. In a way she’s experiencing her world through the lens of martyrdom; what is the alternative? Suffering without reason? Martyrdom gives reason to suffering after the fact; it is an easy, blunt way to make sense of things, although there is also an extremism to it. But this works for her; she wants extremism in the meaning of her reality to match the extremism of the suffering she has endured.
The novel begins and ends with a knife wound to the rib cage—first in the protagonist and then in the man she encounters. Is there any religious symbolism in these knife wounds?
There is a lot of obvious resonance with Jesus’ fifth sacred wound, and that was intentional, certainly. It goes back to her organizing her experiences according to the logic of martyrdom, in a way.
Can you unpack the novel’s title, Supplication?What does “supplication” mean to you?
To me, this comes back to the desperate search for meaning that the protagonist is involved in. She’s really seeking something to throw herself at the feet of, something that will take her agency from her and that she can sublimate herself within. She’s begging for something. And I think the religious aspects of the word “supplication” were important for that as well, for how her search is spiritual and mythological in scope. And the word “supplication” is not a word that you encounter every day. It doesn’t come up in common speech. You’re more likely to find it in religious texts. I think that that connotation was a good way to summarize the scope of her search and her desperation.
Alongside religious imagery, this novel contains a good deal of imagery—at times gruesome and torturous imagery—related to the body. Can you comment on the way that the physical body informs your writing?
The interesting thing about the body is that it’s the thing that’s the most near to you. But in a lot of ways, it’s also the thing that’s most alien from you. And I think that the protagonist sees this through her exploration of the world. Just as she’s really alienated from the world around her and alienated from the people around her, she’s also really alienated from her own body, and that’s represented in different symbolism throughout the novel. Different things are happening to her body and rendering it more alien from her. That was the scariest part of writing the novel for me, a really scary way of demonstrating what’s happening to her. This thing that’s the most intimate to her is also the thing that’s most far away from her.
Do you think that women’s experiences of their bodies might lend themselves more readily to this sense of alienation?
Alienation from one’s body is definitely something that women experience a lot more than men do. And also, for the protagonist of the novel, the idea of bodily alienation is reflected in the way that her body is used as a tool—or at least the way she thinks of her body as being used as a tool—especially as she’s carrying this demonic entity. There are a lot of really gendered connotations to that.
In the beginning of the novel, the narrator is called “child” by her torturer. Then, about midway through the novel, the term “child” shifts to refer to the entity that is growing within her. Is this a straightforward reference to a child or a pregnancy?
The child is not a straightforward reference to a child or a pregnancy. The protagonist might be seeing it in that way at times. But the child is also a more general manifestation of her search for meaning in her world and her need for something else that will guide her will through the world. And she is taking that thing within herself and letting it guide herself.
The novel shifts between different spaces that are equally desolate—abandoned homes, public spaces that seem peculiarly marked by their absence of people. What role does this sense of desolation and abandonment play in the narrator’s search for meaning?
The narrator feels utterly alone, and yet she encounters many people throughout the narrative; from her landlord to the couple to the hospital staff, there are nearly always others flitting around her, and yet she can’t connect with them, not in any real way. The environments that she moves through—the parking garage and hospital—for instance, are interesting in that they are spaces that are made specifically to be occupied by humans—created by us and for us—but they’re spaces that often feel completely alien and alienating. When people talk about “liminal spaces” they’re nearly always referring to environments like this, and that’s interesting because they’re quintessentially human spaces, and yet it doesn’t feel like it. They feel more alienating than something that wasn’t made for us whatsoever, like a forest or a field. The logic of these environments that she’s navigating mirror how she feels within her encounters with other people: utterly alone and abandoned, yet immersed in a very human world.
I asked you earlier how you felt and how you would have projected your audience to feel at the beginning of writing your novel. How did you feel after you’d written it?
I felt pretty awful, honestly. It was a really difficult book to write. I was very interested in horror when I started writing, and by the end it had kind of sensitized me to horror as a genre, to the point where I now find it difficult to engage with materials that are violent or frightening. I think I ended up seriously empathizing with the protagonist, to the point where I started to feel badly about the things that I was writing and the violence that I was forcing her to undergo as a character in the book. So, it was in a lot of ways really devastating for me to write this novel. And these feelings inform the ending of the book, which I left open to interpretation. There is nothing definitive that happens at the end. The protagonist is left to make a choice. She can choose what she’s going to do next. And I think that was an important decision to have made as a writer. I as a writer can’t tell my protagonist what to do next. She has to make that choice for herself. It’s something that I can’t impose on her.
Do you feel that the protagonist’s search for meaning is successful?
For the protagonist in this novel, I think that the search for meaning is never truly successful, no. It was left deliberately unresolved at the end, and I did this intentionally because her search for meaning was an attempt to renounce her agency. She was searching for something to sublimate her agency so that she didn’t really have to make any difficult choices. And that was the sort of meaning that she was looking for. I think that this is generally for humans how we look for meaning, be it religious or career related or community related. We are looking for something to guide us so that we don’t really need to make choices for ourselves, a grander structure that we can sublimate ourselves into. And I think that approach can never succeed. I think for my protagonist, it also wasn’t successful. She was searching for meaning in really desperate, extreme ways and that is never going to be successful. So, I would say that it did not work out for her in the end. But whether or not she continues that desperate, unsuccessful search for meaning, or whether she chooses another route is ultimately up to her.
Do you have any upcoming appearances or readings planned to promote the book?
No, I’m basically done at this point. The Canadian edition came out a few weeks ago. I had a pretty successful launch here in Montreal a few weeks ago, and that’s basically it.
Are you working on anything new at the moment?
I am. I’m working on another novel that’s very different from Supplication. It is a romance novel. Something less devastating. A little bit more joyful. But it is also quite sad.
Supplication is now available from Influx Press.
Nour Abi-Nakhoul is a Montreal-based writer and editor. Her first novel, Supplication, was released in 2024 from Penguin Random House’s Strange Light imprint and Influx Press. She works as the editor-in-chief of the award-winning quarterly Maisonneuve Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @nourabinakhoul.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, La Piccioletta Barca, and on her Substack. Instagram/Twitter: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 