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sidoora 's review for:
Enter Ghost
by Isabella Hammad
When I heard this novel was about a production of Hamlet in the West Bank, I was sold. I still did not expect it to play out the way it did.
It was slow moving yet tense, the ending really got me. The last line too. Theatre is such an effective imitation of life, and vice versa. I liked it throughout, but the last third was particularly effective.
I’ve been speed reading a lot of books recently but really had to slow down here.
I don’t know what to say. I’m going to need to process this some more.
I loved the script segments. It’s what really made it for me.
Yeah I need more time to think. But read it!!!!
——
Not a comprehensive list, but a couple quotes that stuck out. (Spoiling some good lines, but not the plot).
“Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary.”
“Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought into my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.”
“When you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet and each film at the cultural centre ends and we applaud as the credits roll with the list of crests of institutional donors…. you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you… are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved.”
It was slow moving yet tense, the ending really got me. The last line too. Theatre is such an effective imitation of life, and vice versa. I liked it throughout, but the last third was particularly effective.
I’ve been speed reading a lot of books recently but really had to slow down here.
I don’t know what to say. I’m going to need to process this some more.
I loved the script segments. It’s what really made it for me.
Yeah I need more time to think. But read it!!!!
——
Not a comprehensive list, but a couple quotes that stuck out. (Spoiling some good lines, but not the plot).
“Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary.”
“Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought into my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.”
“When you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet and each film at the cultural centre ends and we applaud as the credits roll with the list of crests of institutional donors…. you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you… are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved.”