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thegulagula's review against another edition
4.0
'The world has gone to hell and nobody is who they used to be. Everybody I know lost their head a long time ago - and everybody's still looking for where they put it.'
The novel follows the journey of the narrator, Walid Dahman when he went back to the land where he came from to reunite with his mother. When he left 38 years ago, it was still Palestine. Now, everything has changed - from the country, the people and the place.
I had a hard time in the beginning of the novel, trying to get used to the author's style of writing. Intermissions between the narrator's monologues and what actually happened, as well as the author's memories and the present, were not as clear as I was used to. The prologue might seemed draggy but quite important in setting the background of Walid Dahman. Half way through, I was hooked. There were interesting moments, and those that could bring one to tears. Overall it was an enjoyable reading.
'I'm not Israeli, and this land was't promised to me. I wasn't making aliya, nor would I ever. I was born British and I will always be British.'
Note: I wonder how the author chose the title because the gist of the story revolves around the narrator, who is a guy, returning to Gaza. >_<
The novel follows the journey of the narrator, Walid Dahman when he went back to the land where he came from to reunite with his mother. When he left 38 years ago, it was still Palestine. Now, everything has changed - from the country, the people and the place.
I had a hard time in the beginning of the novel, trying to get used to the author's style of writing. Intermissions between the narrator's monologues and what actually happened, as well as the author's memories and the present, were not as clear as I was used to. The prologue might seemed draggy but quite important in setting the background of Walid Dahman. Half way through, I was hooked. There were interesting moments, and those that could bring one to tears. Overall it was an enjoyable reading.
'I'm not Israeli, and this land was't promised to me. I wasn't making aliya, nor would I ever. I was born British and I will always be British.'
Note: I wonder how the author chose the title because the gist of the story revolves around the narrator, who is a guy, returning to Gaza. >_<
thecandidbookclub's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
eleanornagle's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
candelibri's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.5
Delicately beautiful and poignant, The Lady from Tel Aviv tells the story of Walid, an author and journalist, who hasn’t been back to Palestine in 38 years. Now that he has a British passport, he is finally making the trip home to revisit a home he may or may not remember.
Analytical and introspective, Al-Madhoun masterfully weaves in the reality of living under Israeli occupation and the day to day challenges of a people who are committed to their homeland while bringing you seamlessly into the inner workings of the Dahman family.
pippins101's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.5
Middle East, Arabic lit, palestine
mtmteres's review
3.0
Interesting account of a trip back to Gaza after 38 years of absence.
Lots of reflections, conversations and thoughts on how things have changed there, and above all, how the people have changed as well.
I enjoyed it, even though to me it felt more like a personal account than like a work of fiction.
Lots of reflections, conversations and thoughts on how things have changed there, and above all, how the people have changed as well.
I enjoyed it, even though to me it felt more like a personal account than like a work of fiction.
georgehunter's review
3.0
In the first half of the book, the author goes after the Israelis. Then, with that out of the way, he is able to go after the Palestinians before bringing it all home at the end. But don’t misread this interpretive summary - the storytelling here never goes the way one expects.
The Lady from Tel Aviv is simply told. At the beginning of the book al-Madhoun manages absolutely stunning imagery and craft with the language, doing things with English that are easier to do in Arabic, or even Spanish, but almost impossible in English. This beautiful and simple telling means that the unexpected twists come not from over-constructed storytelling gimmicks, but from reality. The book reveals the difficulty of telling a story about Palestine: how can it flow like other plot lines and be worked like other narratives by its telling, and yet also be about this place now? Saleem Haddad’s Guapa, incredibly, finds as much of a way as possible - but he takes twice as many words, a more generic story, and a more narrow focus of message to pull it off. It is not an easy feat to replicate without possibly unrealisable ambition to expand the boundaries of the art-form and maybe even time. “Politics” is as inevitable as the checkpoints and border controls, if the story is to be authentic.
Al-Madhoun finds a way to weave this frustration into the telling, writing that “no matter the lengths to which a narrator goes in order to imagine something, he will never reach the shore of truth. If your understanding of an Israeli border crossing is limited to what you hear or try to imagine in your mind, you will only ever glimpse the outlines of a shadow - which could be shorter or longer depending on how much light you cast on it. But the truth itself: that is a bitch on the imagination and on anyone who wants to tell a story."
So, despite its constant narrative arc, The Lady from Tel Aviv becomes a story of stories and stories told within stories. And what could better transmit the sense of this place than the embedding of stories within other stories? This approach reflects and celebrates the ancient pleasure that remains in our people, a pleasure capitalism has not yet conquered and made its own, a free pleasure of our shared time together. What some call an "oral tradition” is a great human pleasure of telling little stories that somehow embraces an ability to agree and disagree, placing life’s troubles and disputes into a larger frame. Thus, we are reminded of our joyful connection to each other without robbing our stories of the emotions they carry.
So The Lady from Tel Aviv suffers from its simplicity, its - for lack of a better word - ramblingness. But at the same time, this is also the source of its strength, its honesty, authenticity and originality. It could only have been this way. We are a fragmented people and our lives have been made into al-Madhoun’s random and often Kafka-esque scenes by colonialism. This common theme cannot help but express itself in all art from this corner of the world, whether in the literature of Rabih Alameddine, or the art of Emily Jacir, or the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. This book is light and short - a quick, beautiful pleasure - and yet despite, or because of this, it draws out the inhumanity wrought by colonialism (by both colonial and coopted native protagonists) and the humanity of anti-colonialism (by both native and ex-colonial protagonists). And it is this nuanced and genuine approach, a narrative politics that focuses on systems of injustice instead of identity politics, that is a final winning factor in favour of The Lady from Tel Aviv.
The Lady from Tel Aviv is simply told. At the beginning of the book al-Madhoun manages absolutely stunning imagery and craft with the language, doing things with English that are easier to do in Arabic, or even Spanish, but almost impossible in English. This beautiful and simple telling means that the unexpected twists come not from over-constructed storytelling gimmicks, but from reality. The book reveals the difficulty of telling a story about Palestine: how can it flow like other plot lines and be worked like other narratives by its telling, and yet also be about this place now? Saleem Haddad’s Guapa, incredibly, finds as much of a way as possible - but he takes twice as many words, a more generic story, and a more narrow focus of message to pull it off. It is not an easy feat to replicate without possibly unrealisable ambition to expand the boundaries of the art-form and maybe even time. “Politics” is as inevitable as the checkpoints and border controls, if the story is to be authentic.
Al-Madhoun finds a way to weave this frustration into the telling, writing that “no matter the lengths to which a narrator goes in order to imagine something, he will never reach the shore of truth. If your understanding of an Israeli border crossing is limited to what you hear or try to imagine in your mind, you will only ever glimpse the outlines of a shadow - which could be shorter or longer depending on how much light you cast on it. But the truth itself: that is a bitch on the imagination and on anyone who wants to tell a story."
So, despite its constant narrative arc, The Lady from Tel Aviv becomes a story of stories and stories told within stories. And what could better transmit the sense of this place than the embedding of stories within other stories? This approach reflects and celebrates the ancient pleasure that remains in our people, a pleasure capitalism has not yet conquered and made its own, a free pleasure of our shared time together. What some call an "oral tradition” is a great human pleasure of telling little stories that somehow embraces an ability to agree and disagree, placing life’s troubles and disputes into a larger frame. Thus, we are reminded of our joyful connection to each other without robbing our stories of the emotions they carry.
So The Lady from Tel Aviv suffers from its simplicity, its - for lack of a better word - ramblingness. But at the same time, this is also the source of its strength, its honesty, authenticity and originality. It could only have been this way. We are a fragmented people and our lives have been made into al-Madhoun’s random and often Kafka-esque scenes by colonialism. This common theme cannot help but express itself in all art from this corner of the world, whether in the literature of Rabih Alameddine, or the art of Emily Jacir, or the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. This book is light and short - a quick, beautiful pleasure - and yet despite, or because of this, it draws out the inhumanity wrought by colonialism (by both colonial and coopted native protagonists) and the humanity of anti-colonialism (by both native and ex-colonial protagonists). And it is this nuanced and genuine approach, a narrative politics that focuses on systems of injustice instead of identity politics, that is a final winning factor in favour of The Lady from Tel Aviv.
jayeless's review
4.0
A beautiful, engrossing novel about Palestine, set shortly before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. It follows a sixty-something-year-old writer, Walid – who would seem to be based on the author himself – as he returns to Palestine for the first time in thirty-eight years, having been forcibly separated from his family by the occupation, and observes the ways in which his homeland, his family and his friends have changed, mostly for the worse. The Khan Younis where he spent his childhood has been lost, and many of his loved ones have met tragic ends. The novel is naturally scathing of Israel, of the daily humiliations meted out on the Palestinians, of the violence of the occupation, and the theft of the land in the first place, including Ashdod, where Walid was born.
It's not a novel that dehumanises Israelis though, which is the role that the titular "lady from Tel Aviv", Dana, has to play. Honestly I was expecting Dana to play a bigger role in the novel, what with the title and half the blurb being given over to her, but she is what she is. She's someone fed up with the conflict, who wants peace, but isn't political beyond that. I don't really want to spoil her subplot, so I'll leave it there…
The best part of this novel is the little things, in the observations of occupation. I get the sense that Walid is a thinly disguised version of al-Madhoun, that the novel Walid is writing represents this novel, and so on. Walid's difficulty simply entering Israel was compelling reading, and rang true; I once knew someone, a Palestinian who'd grown up in exile, who tried to visit home but was interrogated at Ben Gurion airport for twelve hours and sent back to Australia. Al-Madhoun makes sure to contrast the difficulty Palestinian exiles and refugees have accessing home with the ease that all Jewish people in the world have, and so he should.
The main problem I had with this novel is that the plot didn't seem very cohesive or unified; it was more like, "this happened, then this, then this, then this". Admittedly, this makes more sense if you think of the novel as a fictionalised retelling of the author's own experiences, but… it was narratively unsatisfying. Therefore I can't say I "really liked it" (which is Goodreads' definition of four stars) but I heartily recommend it.
EDIT: I'm bumping my rating up to four stars; in retrospect I was too harsh on it for how much I liked it! Maybe the plot is a bit thin, but it it has many more compelling qualities.
It's not a novel that dehumanises Israelis though, which is the role that the titular "lady from Tel Aviv", Dana, has to play. Honestly I was expecting Dana to play a bigger role in the novel, what with the title and half the blurb being given over to her, but she is what she is. She's someone fed up with the conflict, who wants peace, but isn't political beyond that. I don't really want to spoil her subplot, so I'll leave it there…
The best part of this novel is the little things, in the observations of occupation. I get the sense that Walid is a thinly disguised version of al-Madhoun, that the novel Walid is writing represents this novel, and so on. Walid's difficulty simply entering Israel was compelling reading, and rang true; I once knew someone, a Palestinian who'd grown up in exile, who tried to visit home but was interrogated at Ben Gurion airport for twelve hours and sent back to Australia. Al-Madhoun makes sure to contrast the difficulty Palestinian exiles and refugees have accessing home with the ease that all Jewish people in the world have, and so he should.
The main problem I had with this novel is that the plot didn't seem very cohesive or unified; it was more like, "this happened, then this, then this, then this". Admittedly, this makes more sense if you think of the novel as a fictionalised retelling of the author's own experiences, but… it was narratively unsatisfying. Therefore I can't say I "really liked it" (which is Goodreads' definition of four stars) but I heartily recommend it.
EDIT: I'm bumping my rating up to four stars; in retrospect I was too harsh on it for how much I liked it! Maybe the plot is a bit thin, but it it has many more compelling qualities.
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