Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram

Ìęby Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Yale University Press)

The protagonist of Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, is an Iraqi expat who returns to Baghdad as a translator. Nameer is hired by a pair of Americans filming a documentary. It’s his first time back since his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child.

While in Iraq he decides to visit the bookshops on al-Mutanabbi Street. There he meets a bookseller named Wadood who is working on an unusual project: a kind of catalog of the objects destroyed in the bombings. It includes commonplace items like a handmade kashan, a stamp album and a stone wall. But also a fetus, a Ziziphus (or Christ’s Thorn) tree, and a pair of twins. His stories are often told from the point of view, and in the voice, of the anthropomorphized objects. Structured as colloquies, or “conversations,” they call to mind the Aesop’s fables and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. Nameer, intrigued, tries to convince Wadood to let him translate the writings into English. And Wadood, considering the offer, leaves a copy of his manuscript at Nameer’s hotel in an envelope. Nameer takes it back to America with him.

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, another book on this year’s longlist, is also concerned with the disappearance of everyday things. Particularly the items we most take for granted. In both Ogawa’s and Antoon’s writing the empty spaces left behind are imbued with emotional and cultural significance. In The Memory Police, each disappearance is a loss to the community, but one which most of the community accepts in silence. There is a gentleness to her descriptions, and a tangible sadness. Even if they don’t remember what they’ve forgotten, they remain aware of the act of forgetting. In The Book of Collateral Damage the colloquies are more violent, but no less haunting. Each loss is a complete erasure and the human component, as perpetrators and victims, is surprisingly powerful—even when described by an inanimate object without contextual awareness.

I say “my mother” because I claim that she loved me as if I were her son. I remember how her son used to cry in her arms when she fed me. He and his three brothers. But he’s grown up now. But even so she told him off when he tried to persuade her to get rid of me and replace me. “But this oven is older than you. It has fed you and your brothers since your father died and it has helped pay your university fees. I won’t let it go till I die,” she said. She used to swear by me, saying, “By this oven!”

After returning to the United States, Nameer takes a job at Harvard, and then NYU, teaching Arabic language and literature. He keeps the manuscript. Years pass. He completes his dissertation, falls in love, and remains in contact with Wadood—though the ongoing war and Wadood’s personal situation make it difficult at times to stay in touch. Nameer remains obsessed with translating Wadood’s stories, despite Wadood asking him not to. Nameer has also begun collecting articles and pictures from newspapers about the continuing war in Iraq. He hangs them on his apartment walls in hope they will provide him with the inspiration he needs to write a novel of his own.

The Book of Collateral Damage reads as semi-autobiographical. At one point, Nameer talks about an idea he has for a novel about a young man who washes the corpses of the dead in Iraq—pretty much the plot of Antoon’s 2013 novel, The Corpse Washer. His protagonist identifies with Iraq as his home country, but as an American he is far removed from the actual fighting. The truth is that other than a few insensitive colleagues, and family members who still reside in Iraq but with whom he doesn’t seem particularly close, the war barely impacts his day-to-day life. And, yet, he struggles and cries out in his sleep. He’s often angry and unhappy. He carries the war inside him and his girlfriend believes he suffers from P.T.S.D. As the book goes on we see that the occupation of Iraq has affected Nameer and Wadood differently, but both men carry emotional and psychological damage because of it.

I was going to ask him whether he knew that in Arabic the words for hope and pain were almost the same, with just the two consonants transposed—amal and alam.

Most of what I’ve written so far is plot summary, barely touching on the overarching themes or the translation or how strange it was to be reading this book while I, like other non-essential workers, sit at home in obeyance of stay-at-home orders issued in response to a global pandemic. Antoon is very good at capturing the strangeness (and frustration) of living tangential to, yet still affected by, historical events. Years from now, when someone asks what it was like during COVID-19, what do we say? We stayed at home, took long walks, sewed masks and worried about how to pay our bills. While the men and women in hospitals and grocery stores, distribution centers and manufacturing, public service and food delivery, still went to work every day. Nameer wants to do something, to have some positive impact on what is happening in Iraq, when in reality he is both helpless and irrelevant. He is also aware of the hypocrisy of his position. It’s not all that hard to relate.

Should this book win The Best Translated Book Award? Maybe. If I’m being honest . . . I don’t know. Its chances seem slim, when you consider that I’m writing about it rather than one of this year’s judges. My recommendation is read it anyway. Jonathan Wright’s translation is keen and light. He wisely lets the plot bear the weight, not the prose. It’s a good book. And a good reminder that our present situation is just another blip in the history of civilization. Antoon writes about the Iraq war from a different perspective than we’re used to seeing. Nameer is both Iraqi and American. He is aware that he is in a privileged situation—working for an elite university and living comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the world. His family remains safe. In one sense, the bookseller Wadood is a thread that stretches between Baghdad and Manhattan, allowing Nameer a connection to a country and a war he feels increasingly removed from. As I said, Antoon writes best about ordinary people caught on the periphery of battle. He does so honestly, without shying away from the truth about his characters or their situations, even when those truths are sometimes unattractive and those situations far outside our ability to control.

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 °”ÍűłÔčÏ’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.

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.

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.

Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote this piece, which is basically a run down of recently published works of Arab literature. She doesn’t mention The Zafarani Files, which is a personal favorite and is on the BTBA longlist, but the titles she cites all sound rather interesting. I highly recommend reading the whole article, but in shorthand, blog-world fashion, here’s a rundown of the titles covered, with short quotes and links to buy the books at

• by Mahmoud Saeed, translated by Ahmad Sadri (Saqi Books)

For all the horror it details, this is a startlingly warm and humane book. Saeed, despite the incitements of his subject, does not aspire to the Kafkaesque—Kafka, it must be admitted, is among the most impossible of authors to emulate, along with García Márquez—but maintains a specificity of place and history (this happened in Basra, that happened in Mosul) and of the individuals who inhabit them. Set mostly in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War, in the late nineteen-seventies, this slender novel tells of a mild-mannered Basra schoolteacher who, although cautiously apolitical, is whisked off one day for “a simple interrogation.” His subsequent experience in six levels of hell—six prisons in all—is exactingly described, but the long ordeal is mitigated, both for him and for the reader, by a dose of bitter humor, a share of personal good will, and the mutual trust that he discovers among the prisoners, a trust long since forfeited in the larger prison of the informer-ridden society outside.

• by Sinan Antoon, translated by the author and Rebecca C. Johnson (City Lights)

The title refers to the practice of adding dots—diacritical marks—to various letters of the Arabic alphabet, some of which are indistinguishable without these marks in place. An undotted sequence of letters may signify a number of different words; the correct translation can be determined only by context. The story’s intriguing premise is that a handwritten, undotted manuscript has been found in a file in Baghdad’s Interior Ministry, and a functionary assigned to add the necessary dots and make a transcription: the resulting manuscript forms the body of the book. The text turns out to be the work of a university student whose gift for political mockery got him sent to prison, where he wrote the manuscript—leaving out the dots to avoid further incrimination. Its uncertain readings cause the scribe to offer footnotes to such perplexing references as “the Ministry of Rupture and Inflammation” (“Could this be the Ministry of Culture and Information?”) and to such obvious errors as occur in the well-known song lyric that details how the nation’s leader moves from house to house and “fucks us into bed.” (“Note: the original lyrics read ‘tucks.’ ”)

• by Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick (Lynne Rienner)

“Men in the Sun” is, on the simplest level, a gripping tale that unfolds with Hitchcockian suspense as the reader is reduced to fearfully counting the minutes on the smuggler’s wristwatch. The prose is lean, swift, and—in Hilary Kilpatrick’s translation—filled with phrases of startling rightness: “The lorry, a small world, black as night, made its way across the desert like a heavy drop of oil on a burning sheet of tin”; or, even better, “The speedometer leapt forward like a white dog tied to a tent peg.” The realistic intensity of Kanafani’s world tends to conceal his stylistic ambitions: the intricacy with which he weaves together past and present, fact and delusion, and the alternating voices of his characters, each of whom is drawn with the rapid assurance of a charcoal sketch. But on a deeper level Kanafani’s work is about the desperation that drove these men to such lengths to regain work and dignity; it is about the longing—just emerging in the Palestinian public voice—for the moist earth and the olive trees of the villages left behind in 1948. Most painfully, it is about the awakening of self-recrimination for acquiescence in the loss, as in the thoughts of an old man who has been living “like a beggar” and decides to risk the journey.

• by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies (Archipelago/Picador)

A tremendously ambitious work, covering half a century of Palestinian history, it begins with maps of the region dotted with the names of old Palestinian villages, the way big Russian novels begin with family trees: here, through all the narrative advance and obliteration, is what you must keep steady in your mind. Set in a dilapidated hospital in the Shatila refugee camp, in Beirut, in the mid-nineties, the book’s many winding stories are told by a male Scheherazade, a fortyish Palestinian medic whose unceasing talk is intended to rouse a comatose old man, a resistance hero who spent decades sneaking over the Lebanese border into Israel, to carry out attacks that earned him the title the Wolf of Galilee. We do not see much of the attacks; instead, we see the warrior as a lover—not as the Wolf but simply as a man—paying secret visits to his wife, left behind on what has become Israeli land. As a result of these conjugal visits, the hero plants his children in Galilee, before going away again to fight to liberate them.

So great to see a piece like this. Getting info about any international lit in translation can be hard, but finding out about Arabic literature tends to be especially tricky. Hopefully I can write a lot more about the Arab publishing scene—and interesting untranslated titles—next month during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair . . .