Blind spot

“He wondered what he was hiding at his waist… He wished it wasn’t a knife. He feared kids with knives even more than adults with knives.” In one of the out-of-the-way schools, the gaze of a teenager who is discovering the boundaries of his own dark world in Baku’s shadowy streets collides with that of a teacher who approaches his work without enthusiasm. The teenager rebels against family ties, picks pockets, and goes to school only to sleep. The teacher looks for ways to bring him back into society, but before long their relationship, growing knotted and complex, turns dangerous. In Naiq Babayev’s novel Blind Spot, harrowing moments from the lives of characters who, like all people, hope and make mistakes, sometimes flare up, sometimes grow disenchanted with life, and cannot always do as they wish are narrated as stories. Through them, we witness the unseen sides of school and adolescent life.