The pain and harshness of life stem from a person not understanding the difference between death and departure. Both carry the same content, and may carry the same general meaning to many sensitive-hearted people, albeit in different ways of presentation. While death, albeit harsh, is the inevitable end to a person's life and the end of existence, departure is a long journey through a dark tunnel with no clear destination, even if its beginnings might be drawn with extreme precision, making us realize that it and death are one and the same.

Within pages that do not exceed one hundred and twenty, the author – Mohammed Ismail recounts the suffering of a small Algerian family in the country of a million martyrs. Consisting of a drunken father who decided to take up the profession of tailoring and embroidery as a real and actual profession at the end of the events of the novel, even though he did not practice anything else throughout his life. But a decision from the past to stop its implementation due to capricious reasons, and a rebellious mother without a real existence to the meaning of motherhood who decided to leave the country - from the beginning of the journey without preamble or prior warning - with her little daughter to an unknown that seems luminous, emitting a faint light that does not match her rampant ambitions, in one of the European capitals. She decides to rebel and professionalizes all means of debauchery in a legalized form to see it as a respectable and acceptable profession in her prickly conscience, leaving the apples of her eye, two other daughters at different stages of adolescence, without support with this father who is constantly absent from consciousness.

The idea of departure either begins with obvious indications that are understood by everyone, but are unknown to all who are absent from consciousness by his will, engrossed in the fleeting pleasures of life. Or those signals are accompanied by a clear decision from the core of the human mind, prepared to accept the idea of abandonment in general. Thus, the course of life and its noise, which does not care about anyone, is capable of rewinding the past in continuous and intermittent memories to make the picture clearer, but after it's too late. It is possible that the decision to leave for one person is a new, different beginning for another person, who decided to give up this life with full consciousness and will from all his commitments and duties as a responsible father and the hardship of a small family for a period that is not brief. But he decides to start anew to practice his human duties and tasks after a recovery period covered by forgetfulness.

Some may wonder, is there a need for this sudden departure in order to change the situation and for things to proceed in a scope outside the logical conception of the sequence of events? The answer is that the departure of the body may carry a lot of gifts and donations as long as it is without a soul in the right place and time.

The suffering did not stop at a certain point, and there was not a glimmer of hope or light in most of the events and scenes of the novel, and with everyone who lived or experienced these events closely or remotely. It seems like it was the fate of this people and this country to reconcile voluntarily with the idea of war against invasion and colonization to infinity and without an end.

The events of the novel also delve into strange fringes who chose to remain in Algeria even if they were not from its people, as if they did not feel the difference between their countries that are in pain and the one they migrated to. There is no difference between one Arab homeland and another as long as the suffering repeats in varying forms.

The novel is realistic and shocking to a large extent, it weaves a harsh tape with painful details without us feeling the depth of the bleeding wound. The author succeeded perfectly in not elongating or dragging that would not yield better results than what it is in its form in our hands.

I wished for scenes of contact, even from a distance, with fragile reassurance motives between Bahia, the harsh mother who decided to allow departure, and her daughters Lamia and Fatima, especially as the events of the novel were hinting at some phrases that suggested to us the mother's willingness to receive her daughters when the time is right.

"Visitor's Gate" is a measured step forward towards the birth of a professional writer.