Elsanour's "Placebo" novel shines with promises: it is one of those books that, from the first pages, holds a new and distinctive voice.
What begets a work like 'placebo,' a book that should be must reading by fresh university students?
Elsanour has a real talent for description, which elevates this autobiographical work from slightly unearned university memoir – he is in his late twenties – to something more memorably textured.
The first chapter in the novel was very exciting, as the first chapter was called "Death From Everywhere", as a strong evidence of the severe consequence of racism, which makes the reader very excited about the following pages until he reaches the end of the novel without feeling the passage of time.
In addition to the modern university systems, which have become focused on the principle of distributing grades in an organized manner, so that each group gets grades of A, B, C, D, whether the student deserves that degree or not, the important thing is that these grades are distributed proportionally and convincingly for the university's administration! From here begins the idea of racism and discrimination, as the professor is the only one who has all the powers to distribute these degrees even if it is unfair, and often they are distributed according to the whims and ethnic groups between the professors and the students!
The protagonists of the novel invented a way to crack that system and leak questions among everyone so that it became easy for students to obtain full grades, although the distribution of grades remained the same even though everyone was entitled to the grade A, but the university law is the first racial law, so the grade A will not be obtained except for 3 or 4 students!
But it can also be too much, the vivid spray-painting of tiny detail ultimately obscuring any bigger picture. As Elsanour churns through the years, glittering descriptions mount up but meaning or narrative drive doesn’t.
Elsanour, drew on his strong experiences in the fields of medicine, pharmacy, engineering and even business administration, to produce with this wonderful mixture a group of students who united and formed a wonderful team to fight the racism and discrimination that stalk their races and origins in one of the Gulf countries.
It is all very relatable, especially if you’re roughly of his generation. I felt pinprick-precise needlings of nostalgia; Placebo will surely find readers who’ll groan and declare they “feel so seen”. But if some of the period detail may give you flashbacks, Elsanours leans rather too heavily on his litanies of it.
