A landmark work of contemporary Arabic literature, at once allusive and defiant.
An enigmatic novel of resistance by the prizewinning Syrian writer in exile.
Huddud’s house is a real place in Azzam’s elegantly unfolding story, a ramshackle maze containing 170,000 Arabic books and 12,000 manuscripts. “Every room in this house has a story and an era,” Dr. Anees Alaghwani reads in one of those books; he has inherited the place and returned to Damascus from England in order to sell it. Alas, the era of Anees’ story is 2011, the dawn of the Syrian revolution and civil war, and powerful forces are conspiring to thwart his quest for profit. Some are shadowy, some have better intentions. Says a woman named Samia, who will come to figure prominently in Anees’ story, “What you need to keep in mind is that we will resist the sale of this house with everything we have.” She speaks, it seems, for the house as a repository of Damascene and Arabic culture, for all its contested meanings. Its name, though, scarcely conceals the Arabic word hudud, sins enumerated in Sharia law, and there are plenty of them: A central character, Fidel Al-Abdullah, raised by a Communist father and a devout mother, drinks and drugs and commits adultery until a switch flips and he to all appearances becomes an Islamist; other figures in the book indulge in similar peccadillos. All fall afoul of Syria’s dictatorial Assad regime, about which Fidel’s married lover, Layl, has this sharp observation: “Those loyal to Damascus’s dictator were wealthy, phony, lowly opportunists....She never met anyone with morals or a noble character who defended the Syrian regime.” Sympathies of this sort can get a person killed, and so they do. Given the subversive themes that punctuate a narrative that, at its best, is reminiscent of García Márquez, it’s small wonder that its author has fled Syria for the safety of Britain.
A landmark work of contemporary Arabic literature, at once allusive and defiant.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781623711153
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A captivating allegory about evil, lies, and forgiveness.
Truth and deception clash in this tale of the Holocaust.
Udo Graf is proud that the Wolf has assigned him the task of expelling all 50,000 Jews from Salonika, Greece. In that city, Nico Krispis is an 11-year-old Jewish boy whose blue eyes and blond hair deceive, but whose words do not. Those who know him know he has never told a lie in his life—“Never be the one to tell lies, Nico,” his grandfather teaches him. “God is always watching.” Udo and Nico meet, and Udo decides to exploit the child’s innocence. At the train station where Jews are being jammed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, Udo gives Nico a yellow star to wear and persuades him to whisper among the crowd, “I heard it from a German officer. They are sending us to Poland. We will have new homes. And jobs.” The lad doesn’t know any better, so he helps persuade reluctant Jews to board the train to hell. “You were a good little liar,” Udo later tells Nico, and delights in the prospect of breaking the boy’s spirit, which is more fun and a greater challenge than killing him outright. When Nico realizes the horrific nature of what he's done, his truth-telling days are over. He becomes an inveterate liar about everything. Narrating the story is the Angel of Truth, whom according to a parable God had cast out of heaven and onto earth, where Truth shattered into billions of pieces, each to lodge in a human heart. (Obviously, many hearts have been missed.) Truth skillfully weaves together the characters, including Nico; his brother, Sebastian; Sebastian’s wife, Fannie; and the “heartless deceiver” Udo. Events extend for decades beyond World War II, until everyone’s lives finally collide in dramatic fashion. As Truth readily acknowledges, his account is loaded with twists and turns, some fortuitous and others not. Will Nico Krispis ever seek redemption? And will he find it? Author Albom’s passion shows through on every page in this well-crafted novel.
A captivating allegory about evil, lies, and forgiveness.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780062406651
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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