Scan barcode
dely_dd's review against another edition
3.0
Libro bello tosto, non solo per la lunghezza, ma anche per come è scritto e perché parla dell'occupazione della Palestina a partire dai primi scontri nel 1948 fino alla guerra civile libanese nel 1982. C'è quindi anche un contenuto bello sostanzioso.
Il narratore è un medico/infermiere palestinese che si trova in un campo profughi in Libano. Un giorno portano in ospedale suo padre adottivo, un palestinese che non ha mai smesso di combattere per la liberazione della sua terra, e che ormai anziano va in coma per via di un infarto. Da qui il medico inizia a raccontare la sua storia, quella del padre adottivo, le loro famiglie e una miriade di altri personaggi incontrati durante la loro vita. All'inizio del libro il racconto è un po' confusionario perché il narratore passa da un personaggio all'altro, da un evento all'altro, senza aggiungere troppe spiegazioni. Man mano che si procede iniziamo a conoscere i personaggi e gli avvenimenti diventano più chiari. La fine è di nuovo un po' pesante da leggere perché troppo tirata per le lunghe. Il corpo del romanzo, invece, si legge molto velocemente perché coinvolge interamente il lettore che riesce a seguire sia la storia dei personaggi che quella della Palestina.
Che altro dire: l'autore ha messo molta carne al fuoco e ci sono molti spunti di riflessione. Due riflessioni mi hanno colpito in modo particolare. La prima quando il narratore (che ha lasciato la Palestina da bambino) si chiede per cosa combattono, visto che loro nemmeno si ricordano della loro terra. Combattono per una terra che esiste solo nelle descrizioni dei genitori o dei nonni; combattono per una cosa che non esiste più tranne che nella loro immaginazione, perché gli israeliani l'hanno completamente trasformata. Al campo non vedevamo immagini, vedevamo ricordi. Ricordavamo cose che non avevamo mai vissuto, facevamo nostra la memoria degli altri.
La seconda, invece, è quando viene detto che gli israeliani, se veramente avessero voluto sterminare i palestinesi, avrebbero dovuto integrarli invece che combatterli. Integrandoli gli avrebbero fatto dimenticare la loro lingua, la loro cultura, cancellando così lentamente il loro legame con il passato. Solo in questo modo gli israeliani avrebbero potuto veramente sconfiggere e annientare definitivamente i palestinesi.
Il narratore racconta uno stesso avvenimento dal punto di vista di più personaggi e così facendo dà al lettore diverse versioni dello stesso evento. È palesemente pro Palestina, ma dice anche che la Storia ha decine di versioni diverse. Se si fissa in un'unica versione, è certo che condurrà soltanto alla morte.
Insomma, un bel libro che sicuramente consiglio.
Il narratore è un medico/infermiere palestinese che si trova in un campo profughi in Libano. Un giorno portano in ospedale suo padre adottivo, un palestinese che non ha mai smesso di combattere per la liberazione della sua terra, e che ormai anziano va in coma per via di un infarto. Da qui il medico inizia a raccontare la sua storia, quella del padre adottivo, le loro famiglie e una miriade di altri personaggi incontrati durante la loro vita. All'inizio del libro il racconto è un po' confusionario perché il narratore passa da un personaggio all'altro, da un evento all'altro, senza aggiungere troppe spiegazioni. Man mano che si procede iniziamo a conoscere i personaggi e gli avvenimenti diventano più chiari. La fine è di nuovo un po' pesante da leggere perché troppo tirata per le lunghe. Il corpo del romanzo, invece, si legge molto velocemente perché coinvolge interamente il lettore che riesce a seguire sia la storia dei personaggi che quella della Palestina.
Che altro dire: l'autore ha messo molta carne al fuoco e ci sono molti spunti di riflessione. Due riflessioni mi hanno colpito in modo particolare. La prima quando il narratore (che ha lasciato la Palestina da bambino) si chiede per cosa combattono, visto che loro nemmeno si ricordano della loro terra. Combattono per una terra che esiste solo nelle descrizioni dei genitori o dei nonni; combattono per una cosa che non esiste più tranne che nella loro immaginazione, perché gli israeliani l'hanno completamente trasformata. Al campo non vedevamo immagini, vedevamo ricordi. Ricordavamo cose che non avevamo mai vissuto, facevamo nostra la memoria degli altri.
La seconda, invece, è quando viene detto che gli israeliani, se veramente avessero voluto sterminare i palestinesi, avrebbero dovuto integrarli invece che combatterli. Integrandoli gli avrebbero fatto dimenticare la loro lingua, la loro cultura, cancellando così lentamente il loro legame con il passato. Solo in questo modo gli israeliani avrebbero potuto veramente sconfiggere e annientare definitivamente i palestinesi.
Il narratore racconta uno stesso avvenimento dal punto di vista di più personaggi e così facendo dà al lettore diverse versioni dello stesso evento. È palesemente pro Palestina, ma dice anche che la Storia ha decine di versioni diverse. Se si fissa in un'unica versione, è certo che condurrà soltanto alla morte.
Insomma, un bel libro che sicuramente consiglio.
runkefer's review against another edition
3.0
Lyrical and beautiful writing, but I found it a bit of a slog. It’s very long. It’s also very stream of consciousness and difficult to figure out at times whose story is being told and by whom—sometimes firsthand, sometimes secondhand, sometimes third hand. That’s the intended effect, I believe, so I finally had to let go of being able to follow 100% of what was going on. I did feel immersed most of the time in the stories of refugees and homeless, stateless people, and their hopes, desires, and perseverance. A worthwhile read, although not always a pleasant one.
alesure's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide and Violence
korrick's review against another edition
5.0
"You are surrounding the cities," she said, looking relieved, "as we did on the Long March."This is one of the few truly devastating works that I've read; if that weren't enough, it's also one of the few truly uplifting works that I've thus far encountered. It's a work that teaches you how to read it if you're willing to honestly engage with it, which means that, considering what the world has consisted of for the last century and a half, it isn't for everyone. Of course, anyone can try their hand at it, but if this is your first taste of the history of Palestine and its diaspora, if this is your first read that was originally composed in Arabic, if this is your first engagement with the kind of literature that attempts to convey the sum of the banal glory of human experience, it would take either a miracle or a great deal of self-deception for you to 'like' this in any way, shape, or form. Considering I got most of the first qualification from Tumblr posts and have only engaged with eleven Arabic works in the past decade, I'm hardly setting up some insurmountably 'woke' task list, or whatever severely cannibalized term is being thrown around these days by those who are uncomfortable when their favorite forms of legalized human sacrifice are taken down from their sanctimonious pedestals. I'm simply sick and tired of the term 'universal' being used as battering ram by the tediously Eurocentric reader, for whom this work is neither 'classic' nor 'indie' nor 'transgressive' nor 'experimental' to exempt it from the sort of whining criticism that those who read only what everyone else is reading, rather what they themselves know to be best suited to their tastes, inevitably give out. This is a work that took 400 of its 500+ pages to break me down and build me back up, and that's on you to decide whether that's good enough for you.
"No," I said. "We're surrounding the countryside because we're outside our country."
Numerous questions flittered across her face, but she didn't say anything more; she didn't understand how you could surround the countryside or how there could be no peasants.
You say, "Enough," and then blind history drags you by the hair back to war.
History [...] extracts from our inner selves people we don't know, people whose presence we don't dare acknowledge.To say this work is antithetical to US literary values is putting it lightly. It may have been published more than two decades ago, but if you asked the author what has significantly changed for Palestinians since then, he could give you some updated historical events and political mandates, but the main issues of Nakba, occupation, and apartheid have largely become more technologically complicated than humanely resolved. If there is a winner, it is not the reader. If there is success, it is not the reader's. If there is peace, and harmony, and joy, it isn't going to be blasted in your front window on your personal piece of the settler state and reassure you that, so long as you make the right financial decisions, you're assured a positive place in the afterlife. Ultimately, this is a text that asks you how a civilization survives after the burning of its trees and the frankensteining of its ecosystem, how a people survives after the border passes through them and leaves only their filleted corpses behind, how a history is carried forward when the mere acknowledgement of a fact or a figure is often met with the steamroller of another's pain, another's agony, another's experience under genocide that has room for neither recognition nor compassion. For a nation such as the USA that is continually forcing itself into a child's clothing in order to excuse its atrocities on the merit of holy war or another, such a text is anathema, for if it cannot identify with the narrator victim, the work itself must be a terrorist.
These questions are unimportant, Father, but our whole life is composed of unimportant questions that pile up on top of one another and stifle us.
"After we liberated al-Birwa, three United Nations officers arrived carrying white flags and asked to negotiate with our commanding officer.Reading this work is akin to one's very first attempts at planting a garden, before trial and error has berthed effective habit and all one can do is wait for the rain to come down when and where it may and hope some recognizable form disentombs itself from the ground. The main cast of characters is barely one or two handfuls, but the heritage passed down by ancestors and the countries bridged across by continually disinherited descendants balloons the names to tens, twenties, making questions of time and place fragmentary and nearly without point. If that weren't confusing enough, the matter constituting the 'true' tales of the main characters aren't 'really' revealed till the very end, and what comes before is hundreds of pages of one child's attempt to trace the meaning of a comatose parent during half a century of invasion, dispersion, and rebellion, give or take a few years. The meaning could be a matter of good versus evil, until you realize that some of the good is in the evil and vice versa, and what allows one force to bulldoze villages with impunity and another force to refrain from bombing a military encampment in retaliation for the the encampment's socioeconomic murder of their child isn't a tale that can be told without reference to the themes of the kind of money, politics, and greed that are in the full flush of health today. And as we all know, in this 'liberal' day and age, (certain kinds of inanimate) property is always worth more than (certain kinds of animate) human lives.
"'But we don't have a commanding officer,' said Salm As'ad.
"'We're just peasants,' said Nabil Hourani. 'We don't have a leader, we're just peasants who want to harvest our crop and go back to our houses. Would you rather we died of hunger?'
"'But you broke the truce,' said the Swedish officer.
"'What truce, Sir? We've got nothing to do with the war. We wanted to go back to our village, so we went.'
"They took Palestine? Let them have it. I just want to visit the grave to make sure I buried him correctly. I don't care about al-Kabri or anywhere else, they're all going to disappear. They took them? They can have them. But they should give us the grave at least."
Manliness, or what we call manliness, consists of flight, because inside all the bluster and bullying and big words, there's a refusal to face up to life.So. Your heroes are communist/atheist terrorists, your stories are one downfall of attrition after another, your futures are scattered in a maze of refugee quotas and university admissions scores, your past is the passing around of photos in ambulances and the watching of televisions in active war zones, and the gods of media consumption and public representation have come and been tricked into disseminating tales of religiously approved cannibalization and thereafter lifting a siege and gone, willing to make money off of literary triumphs and Hollywood blockbusters but not to look the lion in the mouth and ask why it is allowed to feed when so many others are systematically starved to death. It was fashionable once upon a time to bring the life of a Muslim Woman in Distress© to the big screen, but who's going to watch a woman successfully register her children in the face of Israeli oppression by claiming herself to be a sex worker, or another woman disregard the borders of occupational forces and find herself communing with the Jewish resident of her disinherited home who wants nothing more than to trade places and exchange Tel Aviv, Israel for Beirut, Lebanon, or yet another woman who was born in a German ghetto and, under much trial and tribulation, made a loving home in Gaza. You want to "save" these women, but beware the bottomless pit of everything's fair in love and war, where the right woman spits on your birthright and the wrong one understands on a scientific level why you will never turn her land into a bastion of Europe. Complicated, is it not? When you reach to cut off the cancer and find yourself gouging out your eye.
A man can become, in an instant, what he truly is and then forget.
[I]t was the tragedy of intellectuals and artists that they had to go and look and react, and then they'd forget.Some of you reading this may cry out, you promised uplift, did you not? Well, when you're communing with someone like me whose spent the last two decades negotiating with suicidal ideation, you're not going to get your suburban family home, or your imperial grand tour, or your multi billion dollar blood emerald fueled dynasty. Instead, you're going to get bloodletting introspection, dire self-reflexivity, a never ending questioning of the definitions of "winning" and "losing," "happiness" and "sadness," and a commitment to an acknowledgement of the realities that refuses to roll over and beg in the face of the exigencies of Omelas. If those and other terms such as BDS, PLO, and sovereignty bore you, set you off, or encourage you to roll your eyes, you're not going to get uplift, or even a reason to engage with a work that isn't going to put a bandage on your boo boo and tuck you in at night. This is history that, at the moment of the work's publication, had been lived unwillingly for the past fifty years, and twenty-three years after that, I really can't say whether the mounting international recognition of the State of Palestine really means anything tangible. So, if you prefer your history cut and dried, do what most readers on this site do, and cut yourself at WWII, when the good guys were grand and the bad guys were conniving and it was much easier to tell oneself that progress had something to do with humanity rather than everything to do with chance and convenience.
Is this what things have come to? They're afraid of the victim! Instead of treating the patient, they fear him, and when they see, they close their eyes. They read books and write them. it's the books that are the lies.
We'll assimilate with the Arabs, you can assimilate with the Europeans, this land will be deserted, and we can turn it into a resort for tourists and religious fanatics from every nation. What do you say?'There isn't much left of 2021, and I don't see myself reading anything that tops this during the remaining month or so. I talk sometimes about how I likely came to a work too late when I find myself amidst poor writing and juvenile concerns, but with this work, eight and a half years ended up being just the right amount of time for me to build up a sufficient bulwark of context and an effective amount of critical literacy. That's not something I can loan to any aspiring readers of this work, who, if they aren't already operating in Arabic, are going to have to find their own [b:Cities of Salt|2722|Cities of Salt (مدن الملح #1)|Abdul Rahman Munif|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386584311l/2722._SY75_.jpg|68434206], their own [b:The Woman from Tantoura|17678418|The Woman from Tantoura|Radwa Ashour|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1367226412l/17678418._SY75_.jpg|13086736], and go from there. Something that I didn't recognize under my own power while reading is that Elias Khoury inserts himself in at the very absolute tail end of this piece, and looking back, I found such a choice to be perfectly in tune with the monumentally ambitious, yet compassionately humble writing that came before it, where the author acknowledges himself to be little more than an observant outsider who wants, above all else, to truly connect. As he himself points out for hundreds and hundreds of pages, such an action is fundamentally flawed and highly prone to exploitation, and what "truth" comes out of it may as well have died during the massacres. But to try is what it takes to truly be human, no?
"'You understand nothing about Jewish history,' he said.
"'And do you understand anything about our history?'
Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn't lost and we find we've fallen into eternal sleep?
Poetry, my song, is words we use to heal our shame, our sorrow, our longing. It's a cover. The poet wraps us up in words so our souls don't fall to pieces. Poetry is against death — it's both sickness and cure, the bare soul and its clothes. I'm cold now, so I take refuge in poetry, hiding my head in it and asking it to cover me.
maryamsb's review against another edition
emotional
informative
lighthearted
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.0
thatdistantlake's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape
ratko_radeta's review against another edition
3.0
Намера Елијаса Хурија, либанског писца је вредна хвале - желео је да напише једну елегичну књигу која ће дати глас потлаченим и прогоњеним Палестинцима и дати смисао свим њиховим патњама.
Поставка је јасна, протагониста Халил, седи у болници уз постељу свог умирућег "учитеља", палестинског борца (непоузданог имена) и причањем и присећањем на најразличитије догађаје покушава да га одржи у животу.
Такав опис ме је и привукао, међутим, било ми је тегобно да се пробијам кроз ову књигу.
Превише рукаваца, превише прича у причи у причи у причи (и тако у недоглед), превише тангенцијалног приповедања, исте ствари се варирају на 3-4 начина (ок, намера је јасна - непоузданост сећања, али овде је то лоше изведено), превише ликова који се уведу само на неколико страна итд.
Да је ово једно 200 страна краће, сигуран сам да би ми се више допало.
Поставка је јасна, протагониста Халил, седи у болници уз постељу свог умирућег "учитеља", палестинског борца (непоузданог имена) и причањем и присећањем на најразличитије догађаје покушава да га одржи у животу.
Такав опис ме је и привукао, међутим, било ми је тегобно да се пробијам кроз ову књигу.
Превише рукаваца, превише прича у причи у причи у причи (и тако у недоглед), превише тангенцијалног приповедања, исте ствари се варирају на 3-4 начина (ок, намера је јасна - непоузданост сећања, али овде је то лоше изведено), превише ликова који се уведу само на неколико страна итд.
Да је ово једно 200 страна краће, сигуран сам да би ми се више допало.
seppesandra's review against another edition
"Why does history only ever come in the shape of a ravening beast? Why do we only ever see it in mirrors of blood?"
annemattoni's review against another edition
5.0
They call it the Palestinian odyssey for a reason - so heartbreaking and so human and so filled with pain and purpose.
“I believe, like you, that this country must belong to its people, and there is no moral, political, humanitarian, or religious justification that would permit the expulsion of an entire people from its country and the transformation of what remained of them into second-class citizens. So, no, don’t worry. This Palestine, no matter how many names they give it, will always be Palestinian. But tell me, in the faces of people being driven to slaughter, don’t you see something resembling your own?”
“I believe, like you, that this country must belong to its people, and there is no moral, political, humanitarian, or religious justification that would permit the expulsion of an entire people from its country and the transformation of what remained of them into second-class citizens. So, no, don’t worry. This Palestine, no matter how many names they give it, will always be Palestinian. But tell me, in the faces of people being driven to slaughter, don’t you see something resembling your own?”