The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem
Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon
256 pgs. | pb | 9780815611110 | $19.95
Syracuse University Press
Review by Grant Barber

This wonderful, important second novel by Ibtisam Azem in English translation came out just in time for the observance of Women in Translation month—a month in which publishers, translators, authors, booksellers highlight English translations of works by women who write in other languages. Azem is a journalist of Palestinian heritage living in NYC. A credit to her imagination and writing is that one of the main characters in her novel, The Book of Disappearance, flips her own biographical matters: Ariel is male and Jewish, also a journalist filing reports in the opposite direction, to his editor in NYC from Jaffa, the town immediately south of Tel Aviv.

Although other characters appear written from a third person perspective—the chapter headings tell the reader whose perspective we are receiving—the other major voice is Alaa’s. He is a second-generation, internally displaced Palestinian who, along with the rest of the Palestinians living within their ancestral borders, vanishes one night. He was born into a family headed by a matriarch, his grandmother, who remained in Palestine after the creation of Israel in 1948—called by Palestinians the Naqba, the disaster, when 700,000 people left or were expelled from their homes.

The novel starts with the frantic search for Alaa’s grandmother, whom he finds upright, seemingly at peace, and dead. She is seated on a bench overlooking the sea in her beloved hometown of Jaffa. The city and the heritage it contains are strong forces of meaning, nostalgia, and character.

This report of the search turns out to be the start of a diary that Alaa kept, a running commentary addressed to his grandmother about memories, family members and events, his grief at her death as well as the losses she endured, reflections on place, history, and what it means to be a people. This diary has been left behind, discovered by Ariel after the vanishing of Palestinians living in the loosely defined (for the world of the novel) area of Palestine overlapping with Israel. Ariel, a liberal, more secular Jew, lives in the same building as Alaa. They were friends of a complicated sort, with keys to each other’s apartments.

Much of these basics are discursively laid out on the back of the book. What I’d claim is that the bare bones description—the characters, the disappearance without explanation or evidence of mass actions—does not capture the seeming light touch of storytelling by effective authorial voice and prose. Even when the thoughts of the characters turn toward some of the most horrific events of the region, the prose does not confront as much as describe and account. One of Azem’s strengths is that essential skill of showing, not telling. More than once after finishing the novel I would open it up to hunt down a character’s name or a sequence of events and be drawn right back into the story, well beyond finding the answer I sought.

An example of showing: after Alaa’s disappearance, Ariel focuses on his journalist duties, and is not getting much sleep. He climbs the stairs down to Alaa’s apartment; he lets himself in, which leads to him nosing around a bit—like checking out what there is to eat—and then falls asleep, exhausted, on Alaa’s bed for the night. He returns to sleep there again for the next several nights. The literary trope one might be looking for is the realization of “we’re all the same in the end,” or the mourning of the absence of a friend with new insight into unappreciated qualities. But, nope, not even a hint of any change in Ariel indicating empathy. The difference of just a flight or two of stairs is not sufficient a reason. Nothing about the apartment is touted as better—size of rooms, morning light, nothing.

In the Middle East Monitor, reviewer Romana Wadi points out the simplest, most logical explanation for Ariel’s behavior: the reflexive impulse to take over Palestinian dwellings and property. Ariel might represent a progressive viewpoint of Jewish Israelis, but he also seems comfortable repeating some of the rationalizations that try to cover the discomfort of knowing that hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced, sometimes with great violence, from homes in which they and generations before them had grown up. Alaa’s diary recounts a few conversations he had with Ariel when the topics turned toward those tensions, the anger just below the surface that can’t be willed away. By the end of the novel Jewish residents nearby have started casing the empty houses left behind, some with a view of the sea…wondering how and when they might lay claim. The Israeli government passes a law naming an arbitrary day and time by when the Palestinians must show up in person to reclaim their property, or it will be forfeit. The country as a whole seems to stay awake until that 3 a.m. deadline, waiting to see if this law was enough to bring the Palestinians back. It doesn’t, and the initial right of return that was established early in Israel’s modern existence but since blocked—echoes again.

For all the inescapable politics inherent here, Azem portrays people with complicated relationships—Alaa’s mother to his grandmother, fathers of both Alaa and Ariel, a former wife and present lovers of the men. The flow of the novel is smooth, an effective, almost-placid surface under which are deep waters, faster currents, dark places. This novel would make an excellent one for a book club interested in fiction as a door into current challenges.

Once again, a side-matter is that of genre. The besetting event seems like science fiction, a fairy tale or a one-trick magical realism move. The rest of the novel has a realist bent. Perhaps this novel is one more artistic work that makes the need for pigeon-holing novels into genres increasingly irrelevant. From Sterne to Stein to Calvino, and the translator’s own fiction—Antoon in his most recent novel veers outside the constraints of genre—the inclusion of the unexplainable seems actually truer to real life than a Sinclair Lewis or Stendhal novel.

Syracuse University Press merits mention and thanks for its dedication to literary works from the Middle East. It is in company with the U of Texas Press and its Latinx fiction series; the University of Nebraska’s series of fiction in translation; Wake Forest and Irish poetry; Yale Margellos; and �����Թ�’s Open Letter Books. Inherent though is the lower commercial profile all of these great sources of literature in translation into English. One can hope that novels and novelists such as Azem will continue to be supported and promoted on a wider English stage. Some really great work is out there every publishing season.

The Book of Collateral Damage

Author Sinan Antoon is an Assoc. Professor at the Gallatin School of Individual Study of NYU. His undergraduate degree was in 1990 from Baghdad University; his PhD is from Harvard, 2006, in Arab Studies. He came to the U.S. just after the 1991 war and has returned to Iraq several times for personal and professional reasons. He is a poet, translator, and novelist; The Book of Collateral Damage is his fourth book. The Corpse Washer, 2015, was also published by Yale Margellos.

An apt image for Antoon, or at least the narrators he brings to life would be a wax seal depicting a small globe with a person’s head peeking out above one pole, and feet out below the other, a literal depiction of a person passing through the world, with the one-word legend “Honesty.” A reader gets the sense that Antoon is a man travelling through this world based on life details he reveals in interviews, and his choices of stories, people—specifically narrators, language, and tone. That seal image may seem a bit light, but only on the surface: a person facing challenges, not quite belonging, at least at times. It’s a common theme from major world religions, Plato to Camus, contemporary science—being aliens and sojourners in this problematic, indifferent world. Antoon has written a twenty-first century update of the existential novel. Yet religions and philosophies also urge us to know the same world as a gift in terms of food, music, family, and friends. Antoon describes that goodness as well.

Belonging and struggle come with the impressions Antoon’s characters respectfully and non-judgmentally form of other people—taxi drivers, waiters, mentors, and professional peers, to women with whom the protagonist has romantic relationships. In this novel the narrator, Nameer Al-Baghdadi, keeps an interesting distance via observations of people, places, and events. He is present, he takes it all in, he processes, shows, cares: a slight, cool distance, of facticity, a flaneur not just of places, but an observer of life. However, instead of creating a sense of alienation, Antoon’s gift is to create a concreteness of the world portrayed. Toward the conclusion of the novel, Nameer recounts a scene after observing a man in NYC he has seen repeatedly going through bins for discarded cans and bottles to redeem for cash:

A month later, after wrestling with insomnia, I went out at half past four and walked south. After an hour, when I reached the riverbank, I saw from afar a truck parked under the Manhattan Bridge. There was a long line in front of it, with men and women pushing shopping carts piled up with bulging sacks. At the back of the truck a man was taking the sacks and then giving each person an amount of money. I watched for five minutes, then headed back.

While the account described here of the economically marginalized shows consequences of the contemporary urban world, the collateral damage of the title fully emerges in Baghdad, and in the writings of Wadood, which are at the heart of this novel.

Wadood Abdulkarim too is a man not wholly at home in any world. He is a bookseller whom Nameer encountered in Baghdad while serving as a translator for documentary filmmakers. Wadood gives Nameer an unfinished manuscript to perhaps translate; Wadood is ambivalent about this, the purpose of the writing not necessarily seeking publication. Wadood names his manuscript Firhis—catalogue. The writings of Wadood are in his voice, though not a book-within-a-book format, so no set-aside changes in font style or size beyond a chapter title and slightly indented margins. Wadood gives voice to his idiosyncratic vision, articulating the perspective of things of the world—a tree, a book, a wall, a rug, over 20 in all. Each of these sections is named “The Conversation of ______,” with the first one and a concluding version being a variation on the historical spiritual fable The Conversation of the Birds.

These testimonies recount the birth, formation, and growth of each thing of the world—sometimes we have to read a bit to figure out the small mystery of what is being brought forth, each with a history of decades. Each meets a final fate during the first minute of the fall of Baghdad in 2003. By the time we arrive at the concluding gut-punch of the fourth object, a carpet, the reader might feel put on notice that by understatement, showing not telling, this collateral damage will document the real costs to so much of what makes a culture, of the ordinary, which always bears the brunt of wars not of their choosing or control. Wadood explains this when handing Nameer the manuscript:

“This is a project of a lifetime, an archive of the losses from war and destruction. But not soldiers and equipment. The losses that are never mentioned or seen. Not just people. Animals and plants and inanimate things and anything that can be destroyed. Minute by minute. This is the file for the first minute.”

The voicing of inanimate objects as if they have human-like senses of sight and hearing, as well as the retention of memories, is a risky narrative device. A reader might initially experience that move as a bridge too far and absent in any previous familiar framework beyond fables, such as magical realism or a fictional argument for pansychism. A different purpose is served. The first aid in moving beyond this concern is the realization that Antoon has Nameer translating Wadood, and so creating a narrative container, context. Wadood’s Fihris comes with his explanatory writings, including a Preamble which includes:

The minute will be a three-dimensional space. It will be a place where I snipe at things and souls as they move. . . . But we rarely hear their voices, their whispers, because we don’t try. We rarely notice things smiling. Yes, things have faces too, but we don’t see them. Those who do see them, after making the effort and training to do so, and those who talk to them are labeled mad by your standards.

I am the one who saw everything, and I see what they don’t see.

Nameer then observes, “I liked the preamble, the idea of a history of the prey and a catalogue of the first minute. These were wild ideas that were not afraid to take risks.”

After a time the reader starts to wonder if and how Wadood and Nameer are also collateral damage. True to the smaller sections where the object or person emerges from unfolding detail, the novel itself concludes with the final puzzle piece of Wadood’s life, his mind shattering history and his fate. Nameer remarks that he is on his seventh move since coming to the U.S. Mariah, the woman with whom Nameer finds a mutual and significant relationship, traces the scars on his back. She does not ask too much about them, nor does she promise to erase them. As an African American woman she has her own deep understanding of history grounded specifically in the person, in belonging/not-belonging.

However, the collateral damages of history by the powerful do not dictate the entirety of existing as people out in the world. In one well-told scene, Nameer visits Mariah’s mother’s apartment for a meal. Antoon/Nameer appreciates food, home-cooking, or at least the unpretentious flavors of the everyday: figs, breakfast sammun with cream and date syrup, tea, simmet, okra recipes from two different cultures.

Antoon as a citizen of the world has definitive opinions regarding intellectual and political Orientalism. This critical engagement shows in his interviews, non-fiction writings, and a documentary he made about Iraq after the 2003 war. He critiques American invasions of Iraq and the politicians who ordered them, as well as the behind-the-scenes manipulation of foreign rulers, fickle and serving the perceived purposes of the U.S. We know that later, time and again, the support will boomerang back with unintended consequences for both governments and civilians.

Antoon’s fiction also comes as a rejoinder—my reading of him, not a stated concern of Antoon—to those who claim that something called “world-literature” gets initially written with an eye and ear for a theoretical (and mythical) mono-culture dominated by Western taste. The author in this novel cites poets and philosophers from pre-Islamic, pre-modern, and modern Arabic culture. A reader in English can take note in this novel of the authors named to seek out or not; the novel stands on its own regardless.

What is given no quarter, though, is the myopic Western assumption about the primacy of Western philosophy and arts cultures in the larger world. Whether from Asia, the Indian subcontinent, N Africa and other Arabic influenced regions: whole and different written worlds and perspectives, each with a rich, ongoing history are more ancient than, and stand beside, those of Western European traditions.

Sinan Antoon’s perspective and voice are one of the important, emergent witnesses. I’d claim that for the world stage. His books have been translated into French and German, and originally appeared in Arabic. He is building a truly important body of work.

Chris is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, and happens to be taking the next month off to participate in NaNoWriMo. We wish him endurance and good writing juju!

Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review:

From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, Egypt was going through a period of transition. The country’s people were growing unhappy with the corruption of power in the government, which had been under British rule for decades. The Egyptians’ performance at the 1948 Summer Olympics didn’t help bolster nationalism: of the 85 athletes who participated, only five won medals. Meanwhile, a group of Egyptian officers, including future Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, formed the Free Officers Movement. Originally organized to reinstate institutions removed by the government, the movement grew in strength—and ambition—during the Arab-Israeli War. By 1952, the officers not only overthrew King Farouk, but they ended the British occupation and established Egypt as a republic.

Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim lived through the period leading to and following the revolution, and he has written about the effects it has had on his country. His first novel, That Smell (1966), was written 12 years after Nasser’s rise to power, and according to an article in the New Yorker, which called Ibrahim “Egypt’s oracular novelist,” anticipated Nasser’s fall: a year after it was published, the Israelis defeated Egypt during the Six-Day War and took control of the Sinai Peninsula. Ibrahim wrote That Smell after spending five years as a political prisoner; it was during that time when, according to an article in the National, he conceived the idea for Stealth, which was originally published in Egypt in 2007.

The period of history leading to the revolution forms the backdrop of Stealth; however, it isn’t so much a political novel as it is a coming-of-age story. The narrator is an 11-year-old boy who closely observes the actions of adults, including his father, Kahlil, a retired military officer, whom he lives with in a dirty, bug-infested apartment in Cairo. The boy spends a lot of time spying on his father, as well as his friends and acquaintances. If he’s not peeking through keyholes to spy on their private, intimate moments, then he eavesdrops on their conversations. In fact, he seems much more interested in the world of adults than other children, as he only seems to play with other children when he’s forced to.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim lived through the period leading to and following the revolution, and he has written about the effects it has had on his country. His first novel, That Smell (1966), was written 12 years after Nasser’s rise to power, and according to an article in the New Yorker, which called Ibrahim “Egypt’s oracular novelist,” anticipated Nasser’s fall: a year after it was published, the Israelis defeated Egypt during the Six-Day War and took control of the Sinai Peninsula. Ibrahim wrote That Smell after spending five years as a political prisoner; it was during that time when, according to an article in the National, he conceived the idea for Stealth, which was originally published in Egypt in 2007.

The period of history leading to the revolution forms the backdrop of Stealth; however, it isn’t so much a political novel as it is a coming-of-age story. The narrator is an 11-year-old boy who closely observes the actions of adults, including his father, Kahlil, a retired military officer, whom he lives with in a dirty, bug-infested apartment in Cairo. The boy spends a lot of time spying on his father, as well as his friends and acquaintances. If he’s not peeking through keyholes to spy on their private, intimate moments, then he eavesdrops on their conversations. In fact, he seems much more interested in the world of adults than other children, as he only seems to play with other children when he’s forced to.

One person who should be encouraging the boy to play with others, but isn’t, is his father. Instead, the father drags the boy along on errands or visits to friends or family, and this sometimes lead to conflict between the two: “The chemist. His shop is clean and gives off a smell of phenol. A glass bowl is piled high with chocolates and sweets. I pull my father’s hand towards it and he scolds me.” In fact, Khalil tends to lose his patience with the boy, whose clumsiness sometimes causes accidents. Even when something happens that isn’t the boy’s fault (for example, a jacket gets ripped by one of his classmates), he worries about getting scolded. That’s because if the father’s not giving him dirty looks, then he’s lashing out at him.

Ironically, his father isn’t helping matters: Despite his age (he already has two adult children) and his ailing health, he doesn’t give his son a lot of independence. For example, although the boy does plenty of homework throughout the course of the novel, Khalil solves his math problems and writes his English compositions for him. Also, the father won’t let the boy haggle with merchants and even helps him go to the bathroom. However, as the novel progresses, the boy starts to push back, albeit in subtle ways. During a holiday, after he accidentally spills ink on his suit, he questions his father’s choice for an alternative. Later, after catching the father misbehaving, the boy lets his feelings be known.

Unfortunately for the boy, the father is the only real parental figure the boy has. His real mother, Rowhaya, has mysteriously disappeared, although memories of her—as well as possible clues to her disappearance—haunt his present-day world. He has an older half-sister, Nabila, who’s too spoiled by her husband, Fahmi, to pay much attention to the boy. There are also other women, including a couple of maids, who fail to fill the void left behind by Rowhaya.

He not only lacks good examples at home but at school, too. His instructors—at least the ones he’s writing about—are not putting that much effort into teaching. Early on in the novel, his English teacher gives the students the option to leave the class instead of staying for the lesson. Another teacher seems to want to do nothing but draw during a session:

Another student wants help from the teacher. A third one follows him. A fourth and a fifth. Each of them leaves the class after he does their drawing for them. After a while, our numbers dwindle until I find myself sitting alone. I take my notebook and go to him. I put it in front of him without a word. He neither looks at me, nor speaks to me. . . . I go back to my seat. I put my notebook in my satchel, pick it up, and head towards the door. I turn around to look at him. He is absorbed in his drawing.

As you can see in this excerpt, Ibrahim, with the help of translator Hosam Aboul-Ela, keeps the boy’s language uncomplicated as he writes about the banalities of his existence without judging them. At first, it seems like it was written this way to reflect the boy’s age and education; yet the writing is very clear, and the boy’s short sentences have a rhythm all of their own. Also, as mentioned before, there are subtleties in the boy’s text. For example, Khalil forces his son to wear pajamas at a party over his sister’s because that’s all he has. Later, he writes, “Uncle Fahmi tells me: ‘Go with him.’ I bend my head down and look at my pyjamas. ‘I don’t feel like it.’” These three deceptively simple sentences tell us a lot about the boy’s feelings.

In fact, Stealth is proof of Ibrahim’s ability not only to revisit pre-revolutionary Cairo in precise, intricate detail, but also to revisit childhood innocence without tainting it with adult experience. The fact that Ibrahim was 70 when this novel was first published makes this ability even more remarkable. It took many decades for Ibrahim to give us this novel, but because of his persistence of vision, he has given us a novel with power. And power in literature is something that cannot be corrupted.

Jawad is the youngest child from a Baghdad family. His father, like his father before him, is a traditional corpse washer—an honored and necessary role for their Shi’ite Moslem community that eschews embalming for immediate burial. The elder son was in training to be a doctor when drafted and killed during war.

The focus on Jawad tracks his relationships with his father, who starts the gradual training of his son at age eight (as he had with the older son) in the ritual of corpse washing; with his mother, widowed over the course of the novel; and with two different women with whom he is romantically involved. Both his father’s death and the crises of war limit Jawad’s practical future. He longs to be an artist, a sculptor, and completes a university degree to that end, with much tension between son and father. His father’s death, the economic realities of war, and finally his sense of duty, bring him back to the family business.

In Western literary terms the novel is a contemporary form of tragedy. At two different phases of his life Jawad becomes involved with a woman. Each relationship ends, not without love between Jawad and each woman, but without conditions that can lead to marriage. Jawad does not have hubris, but is instead contained by the situations so much out of his control. Like the statues of Giacometti that Jawad admires, he is stretched and distorted by the existential circumstances in which he finds himself, trapped in a way, but not without insight by the conclusion of the novel that gives him a some small sense of meaning and purpose in a profession centered around death.

Interestingly, Antoon brings in the reality of war, often in a matter-of-fact way, as background and context. He neither dwells on it, nor ignores it. This isn’t a novel centered on brutalities, battles, and direct conflicts between the occupied and their occupiers. The same approach applies to the corpses, with the exception of two toward the end of the book; one might expect graphic detail that would personalize all involved—the dead men, the relatives who brought them, the corpse washer, and by extension, the reader. Again, this is not a novel of outrage against the depredations and horrors of war in a visceral manner. Instead, the personal lives of Jawad, his family, his friends, and community members are warped by the unrelenting backdrop of conflict after conflict.

Antoon writes in two different, alternating styles. One is grounded in realistic portrayals in a time of distortion:

I was startled as I uncovered the face of one of the men I washed yesterday. He looked exactly like a dear friend of mine who’d died years ago. The same rectangular cheek bones, and long nose. The skin and eyes were coffee brown. His eyes were shut, of course. Their sockets were somewhat hollow. The thick eyebrows looked as if they were going to shake hands. But, I said to myself, I’ve already seen him dead in my arms once before. The name on the paper was Muhsin. The distinguishing mark that this person, who looked so much like my friend, had acquired was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It looked like a period which had put an end to the sentence of his life. One of the men who brought him to me said he was a shop owner and was killed in a robbery. Thank God, I thought. It’s not a sectarian killing. But does it matter to the dead how and why they die? Theft, greed, hatred or sectarianism? We, who are waiting in line for our turn, keep mulling over death, but the dead person just dies and is indifferent.

The short declarative sentences even when describing the horrific have a certain flatness of tone. Note how Antoon brings by economy of detail into one paragraph the role of corpse washer, the personal (a dead friend), violence, art-making that is life (the period at the end of a sentence), the everyday—a shop owner with friends, sectarian divisions, the finality of death.

The other mode is poetic leading to the surreal. Jawad’s first love, Reem, has just written from Amman revealing that she and her family had left Baghdad because she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she has had a mastectomy:

I see Reem standing in an orchard full of blossoming pomegranate trees the wind moves the branches and the red blossoms appear to be waving from afar. Reem waves as well and her hands say Come close! I walk toward her and call out her name, but I can hear neither my own voice nor the sound of my footsteps. All I hear is the wind rustling Reem smiles without saying anything. I am closer and I see two pomegranates on her chest instead of her breasts. She notices that I am looking at them and smiles as she cups them with her hands from below. Her fingernails and lips are painted pomegranate red. I rush toward her, and when I reach her and hug her, the left pomegranate falls to the ground. When I bend down to pick it up I see red stains bathing my arm. I turn back and see Reem crying as she tries to stop the fountain of blood gushing from the wound.

Antoon does quite an interesting thing as the novel progresses, as he removes the boundaries between the surreal and real-world encounters. An example: when male relatives bring just the decapitated head of a loved one for burial. The routine of washing comes up against the ghastly. Conversely, what seems real becomes revealed as dream: a description of Jawad waiting in line to get his visa to travel to Amman—a plausible step in the progression of the plot—when a suicide bomber ahead in line detonates, and Jawad is covered in blood, and then awakens. Dream and reality, the mundane and the surreal, blur.

This merger of reality and dream comes together in the second love affair Jawad has, with his cousin who has come with her family to live with Jawad and his mother. Over a succession of nights the two insomniacs grow closer and eventually become lovers. When it is time for her family to leave and for Jawad to step forward in one last opportunity to ask for her in marriage, he balks. This is a night-time relationship and cannot be sustained in something like ordinary life, the light of day. Death and Jawad’s duties toward the dead have overtaken him.

Significant roles and symbols interweave to tie the novel tighter together: an uncle in self imposed exile because of Communist sympathies and the impotence of political parties; statues in many roles and anecdotes; normal human institutions such as universities contending with the not-normal.

Pomegranates, like those referenced in the Reem dream sequence already cited, are part of Islamic religious symbolism. One must eat all the small pieces, the arils, of the pomegranate because one will always be from a tree in paradise. Beside the building where the corpses are washed is a small garden watered by the run-off from the washing ceremony. At the center of this garden is a pomegranate tree, beloved by Jawad’s father and eventually by Jawad, who sometimes rests beside it and talks to it. Two twigs from the tree go into each coffin as a symbolic way of easing the journey of the dead.

At the end of the novel Jawad has accepted his place as a corpse washer. The crucial moment comes when he is turned away at the border with Jordan; single men are not allowed to cross. While waiting for his turn at the border he sees a TV showing yet another bombing and the scene of dead bodies. He wonders, with all the conflicted realities with which he struggles, who might tend the bodies. While his sense of vocational call in the moment might be muted, and is a call always caught up in the troubling reality of death, here, however, is a moment where Jawad sees his place in his world.

The novel concludes with Jawad sitting beneath the tree, listening to a nightingale sing, until it is scared away by the arrival of another corpse; Mahdi, his assistant, breaks this silence:

It started singing with a gentle sweetness—as if it knew I had complained that paradise was far away, so it had brought its sound right here . . .

The living die or depart, and the dead always come. I had thought that life and death were two separate worlds with clearly marked boundaries. But now I know they are conjoined, sculpting each other. My father knew that, and the pomegranate tree knows it as well.

Mahdi opened the door and said, “Jawad, they brought one.”

The nightingale fled. I sighed and said, “Okay, I’m coming. Just give me another minute.”

I am like the pomegranate tree, but all my branches have been cut, broken, and buried with the dead. My heart has become a shrunken pomegranate beating with death and falling every second into a bottomless pit.

But no one knows. No one. The pomegranate alone knows.

Grant is not only a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston, but has reviewed for Three Percent for forever, basically, and sometimes also performs as Chad’s stunt double at conferences.

Here’s the beginning of his review:

Antoon gives us a remarkable novel that in 184 pages captures the experience of an Iraqi everyman who has lived through the war with Iran in the first half of the 1980s, the 1991 Gulf War over the Kuwaiti invasion, and then the 2003 war.

Jawad is the youngest child from a Baghdad family. His father, like his father before him, is a traditional corpse washer—an honored and necessary role for their Shi’ite Moslem community that eschews embalming for immediate burial. The elder son was in training to be a doctor when drafted and killed during war.

The focus on Jawad tracks his relationships with his father, who starts the gradual training of his son at age eight (as he had with the older son) in the ritual of corpse washing; with his mother, widowed over the course of the novel; and with two different women with whom he is romantically involved. Both his father’s death and the crises of war limit Jawad’s practical future. He longs to be an artist, a sculptor, and completes a university degree to that end, with much tension between son and father. His father’s death, the economic realities of war, and finally his sense of duty, bring him back to the family business.

In Western literary terms the novel is a contemporary form of tragedy. At two different phases of his life Jawad becomes involved with a woman. Each relationship ends, not without love between Jawad and each woman, but without conditions that can lead to marriage. Jawad does not have hubris, but is instead contained by the situations so much out of his control. Like the statues of Giacometti that Jawad admires, he is stretched and distorted by the existential circumstances in which he finds himself, trapped in a way, but not without insight by the conclusion of the novel that gives him a some small sense of meaning and purpose in a profession centered around death.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Originally published in 1855, this sounds like the sort of crazy, language-centric, unconventional type of book that I would love:

Leg over Leg is the semi-autobiographical account of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. His adventures and misadventures provided him with opportunities for wide-ranging digressions on the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, women’s rights, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between European and Arabic literature. In Leg over Leg, al-Shidyaq also celebrates the beauty of the Arabic language.

Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg Over Leg an unprecedented sui generis work. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its skepticism, and its “obscenity,” and later editions were often abridged. This is the very first English transaltion of the work and reproduces the original edition, published under the author’s supervision in 1855.

It’s quite possible that this jacket copy is pure exaggeration and that the book totally sucks, but my god does this sound like the sort of thing a bunch of my readerly friends (Scott Esposito, Stephen Sparks, M.A. Orthofer, etc., etc.) would know about and have reviewed. Unfortunately, all a quick Google turned up was for an event that took place in 2011.

That’s a pretty sad commentary on something.

One big stumbling block is that the publisher, the which I just found out about approximately 3 minutes before starting to write this post, is selling Leg over Leg in two volumes for $40 EACH. I’m no scholar, but $80 for an obscure Arabic work of literature from the nineteeth century is probably pricing yourself out of the market. (That said, the sales rank on Amazon is #624,733, which is better than some books I’ve seen.)

Also, this cover:

Why such a shitty marketing/pricing job? Well, all it takes is a click on the “About” tab to get all the answers:

Supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute, and established in partnership with NYU Press, the Library of Arabic Literature aims to publish key works of classical and premodern Arabic literature in parallel-text format with the original Arabic and English translation on facing pages, edited and translated by distinguished scholars of Arabic and Islamic studies. The Library of Arabic Literature includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and will encompass a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history and historiography.

In other words, no one who cares about reaching a general reading public. Awesome.

Maybe this book is as unique and interesting as it sounds. Maybe one day a reader-oriented press will publish a classy trade paperback version. Or maybe years will go by and English readers will still never have heard about this and will assume all Arabic literature is 1001 Nights and Aladdin.

“Neighbor, what can I say? All the fake moans of this world rail against the toil of ephemeral things. My moans, however, rail against the insanity of their toil in a time that we ignore and that ignores us, a time that is paralyzed, hand and foot, and that consumes only the fruit of pride. While we live out our days, time laughs from inside a dance circle. Donʼt be afraid. Who knows? Perhaps it will transport us to another region of this existence. There we may confront time with just the same number of moans, which we will transmute to laughs until they die away. Why donʼt you say something?”

Thus ends the two-page-long first chapter of The Diesel, the shortest and most experimental Arabic text that I have ever read. It was published in Beirut in 1994 but didnʼt make it into English until 2012. Because of its extremely sensitive subject matter it was dubbed “the shock novel” by the Arab news station Al-Jazeera, and even though itʼs been nearly twenty years since it was published, The Diesel is still highly relevant to the state of Middle Eastern affairs today. The author, Al-Suwaidi, was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1966, and this first and only novella was written in between two poetry collections (the style of The Diesel is itself both poetic and disjointed). His words are compact and carefully chosen, but at the same time follow the protagonistʼs stream of consciousness. The author explains that his style “is based on the oral culture found in the region. Therefore we cannot say that this literature is essentially a new literature; we say instead that the novel constituted a revolution in popular storytelling.”

Our protagonist is a young boy who remains unnamed until he comes of age and develops his identity as a wildly famous transgender entertainer known as “the Diesel.” See? Controversial. The setting is a small traditional Arab village by the sea which is torn between the old way and the pull of the new generation as led by the Diesel himself. The plot is subtle and woven into so many layers of description that it takes a while to find it. The descriptions themselves are challenging to follow:

A man standing on the shipʼs deck seized a white abaya, which he wrapped around his head, and then kneeled silently, facing us. Meanwhile, all the sailors had dropped their drawers and lined up beside that man, who seized a long stick then and tapped the meaty appendages of their bodies. These were all dead, but even so strange rays emanated from them. I wasnʼt really freaked out, because these rays were a reflection of the seaʼs light on their bodies.

This writing is so abstract that the only name that comes to mind is Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan poet and author whose first language is Arabic but whose works are written entirely in French. Ben Jellounʼs style is similarly stream of consciousness and focuses on gender issues as well (his protagonists include a baby girl raised as a boy) but his plots are still much more structured.

Aside from the fact that the Diesel is a strong transgender character, gender roles is a persistent issue throughout the text. Women are championed by the Dieselʼs sister, who mates with the sea and then names each of her children so that their “lineage is reckoned by female descent, not male.” Other sensitive issues include not only the fact that the Diesel is repeatedly raped by a male wayfarer in a mosque, but that his father endorses it. Later he is also ordered to sleep with a 70 year old woman. Also, a woman rapes her son-in-law using a stick in her mouth after her daughter accuses him of attempting sodomy. These scenes are actually not gruesome at all, but have such a matter-of-fact tone to them that itʼs easy to see why it was banned in the United Arab Emirates for ten years after it was published.

William Hutchins is the translator, and his introduction says that “Al-Suwaidi has portrayed a world heading for collision, a world that many in the Gulf region have worked hard to conceal.” Hutchins has produced an excellent translation through working with the author, completing extensive research of Arabic texts with similar themes, and utilizing his own extensive experience in translation and knowledge of the language. Since Al-Suwaidiʼs writing is so strange, Hutchins must have been forced to play a more pivotal role in the process rather than simply acting as a functional translator. I find the result to be quite successful.

By the end of the work, I realized that the Dieselʼs music had become so popular that the people used him as a symbol to rebel against the ruling powers. This prediction of revolution makes the work even more timely, and certainly more controversial in the Middle East. I would avoid the highly explanatory introduction until youʼve finished it so that the style of the writing may surprise you over and over again. The deliberately disjointed wording is, I think, supposed to reflect an identity crisis that the Arabs have experienced for some time now and that is still playing out as I write. This novella undoubtedly deserves attention for its highly unique execution and relevant subject material, and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone.

Lili was in my publishing class last semester, studies at the Eastman School, and is working towards her

This is the first ANTIBOOKCLUB book that we’ve reviewed, but they seem really interesting, and hopefully we’ll have a chance to cover them more in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s the opening of Lili’s review:

“Neighbor, what can I say? All the fake moans of this world rail against the toil of ephemeral things. My moans, however, rail against the insanity of their toil in a time that we ignore and that ignores us, a time that is paralyzed, hand and foot, and that consumes only the fruit of pride. While we live out our days, time laughs from inside a dance circle. Donʼt be afraid. Who knows? Perhaps it will transport us to another region of this existence. There we may confront time with just the same number of moans, which we will transmute to laughs until they die away. Why donʼt you say something?”

Thus ends the two-page-long first chapter of The Diesel, the shortest and most experimental Arabic text that I have ever read. It was published in Beirut in 1994 but didnʼt make it into English until 2012. Because of its extremely sensitive subject matter it was dubbed “the shock novel” by the Arab news station Al-Jazeera, and even though itʼs been nearly twenty years since it was published, The Diesel is still highly relevant to the state of Middle Eastern affairs today. The author, Al-Suwaidi, was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1966, and this first and only novella was written in between two poetry collections (the style of The Diesel is itself both poetic and disjointed). His words are compact and carefully chosen, but at the same time follow the protagonistʼs stream of consciousness. The author explains that his style “is based on the oral culture found in the region. Therefore we cannot say that this literature is essentially a new literature; we say instead that the novel constituted a revolution in popular storytelling.”

Our protagonist is a young boy who remains unnamed until he comes of age and develops his identity as a wildly famous transgender entertainer known as “the Diesel.” See? Controversial. The setting is a small traditional Arab village by the sea which is torn between the old way and the pull of the new generation as led by the Diesel himself. The plot is subtle and woven into so many layers of description that it takes a while to find it.

Click here to read the entire book.

Here is part of her review:

It is a well-known phenomenon that widespread condemnation of a book will only serve to increase its allure. It then follows that when Ibn Khaldun (a Fourteenth Century historian) attempted to ban Escape of the Gnostic, he may have been doing the text a favor. In a legal opinion, Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the decision regarding such works and their ilk should involve taking all copies and putting them in the fire, then washing one’s hands so that all traces of their contents are erased.” The author of the clearly controversial Escape of the Gnostic, Ibn Sab‘in, is the narrator and focus of Bensalem Himmich’s novel, A Muslim Suicide (translated from the Arabic by Roger Allen). Born in Andalusia during the Reconquista, Ibn Sab‘in practiced Sufism, a mystic dimension of Islam that encouraged self-examination as a means to spiritual enlightenment. A firm proponent of separating religion from the state, he also cautioned against the growing trend of fanaticism in the Arab world. In his day, Ibn Sab‘in’s beliefs were scandalous enough that he was forced to flee first his birthplace, and then his adopted home of Maghrib. He eventually made his way to Mecca, where he supposedly slit his wrists and bled to death in the sacred Ka‘ba. This provocative death inspired Roger Allen’s title for the English translation, a choice that he justifies in his afterword. Though the original Arabic title translates to “This Andalusian,” Bensalem Himmich initially wished to call it “Suicide Inside the Ka‘ba” and requested that the Allen restore some of the controversy.