Unveiling Hidden Realities: Anna Badkhen’s To See Beyond Challenges Perception and Truth
This insight is slantly mirrored in a later essay, “The Book of Conjuring,” where Badkhen recounts a teenage friendship through the reading of a Yiyun Li novel, describing both the book and her own narration through their limitations: “The problem with a first-person narrative is that we get only the narrator’s point of view.” In both, Badkhen is drawn to the edges of what a story can contain, the hero who cannot know what she left behind, the narrator who cannot see beyond herself. This is her translational dilemma, and Badkhen wears it honestly: to write is always to hint at what falls away.
