Summary

As she brushes her teeth in preparation for bed, the narrator, Aaliya Saleh realizes she’s used too much of a shampoo intended to liven up her white hair and has unintentionally dyed it blue. She excuses her strange hair color by explaining that she was distracted when she shampooed and didn’t read the instructions. She also had just finished her Arabic translation of “Austerlitz,” a novel by W.G. Sebald, and was celebrating with two glasses of red wine. When she’d reread her translation of the novel, she was reminded of her friend Hannah, resulting in her distracted state.

Since she was 22 Aaliya has cultivated the art of translating books into Arabic from the English and French versions. She begins each of her new translations on January the first. She believes she’s translated a total of 37 books in the...