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A review by lookingglasswar
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
5.0
stunning
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A Palestinian British actress suffers an upset in her personal life and decides to visit her sister in Haifa for an extended stay. Although her stay in Israel is intended to be brief and uneventful, when she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank she finds herself grappling with her family history, with the reality of the occupation, and the new dimensions the play takes when acted by Palestinians.
This novel is set in 2017, but the contemporary context hovered over me as I read it, charging it with even deeper meaning. Sonia, the narrator, a political naif and someone who has desperately tried to avoid thinking about Palestine, is a tangle of contradictions as she tries to sort out her feelings about Haifa, where she spent summers growing up. Other characters express their frustration over the classic symbology of Palestinian narratives, and the difficulty of creating art under occupation: "I'm just so bored by it all. The symbols. The keys, the kuffiyehs -- I mean, is this all we have? Olive trees? Is this really all we have?"
But this isn't just a political novel, or a novel about art. Sonia's relationship with her sister is the heart of the novel and they struggle to relate to each other. Sonia travels on a British passport, Haneen on an Israeli as she commutes to Tel Aviv, and the gulf between them sometimes seems like it can't be traversed, due to the difference between Sonia's life in London and Haneen's reality as an Arab Israeli -- "It also distressed me to notice that the reality of this kind of news, or at least my sense of its reality, had been increased by geographic closeness. It felt like a throwback to the intifada summers of our adolescence." Nevertheless, in striking interludes they draw closer together, despite "the long frail story of our sisterhood, and all the petty crimes committed, the crosshatching of intention and advantage and betrayal."
I also want to commend Hammad's prose style. It takes exemplary command of style to be able to switch from prose to entire chapters written in stageplay format, both of which add to the scenes they contain and feel completely natural. This is a virtuoso performance for a novel, and I can't recommend it enough.
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A Palestinian British actress suffers an upset in her personal life and decides to visit her sister in Haifa for an extended stay. Although her stay in Israel is intended to be brief and uneventful, when she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank she finds herself grappling with her family history, with the reality of the occupation, and the new dimensions the play takes when acted by Palestinians.
This novel is set in 2017, but the contemporary context hovered over me as I read it, charging it with even deeper meaning. Sonia, the narrator, a political naif and someone who has desperately tried to avoid thinking about Palestine, is a tangle of contradictions as she tries to sort out her feelings about Haifa, where she spent summers growing up. Other characters express their frustration over the classic symbology of Palestinian narratives, and the difficulty of creating art under occupation: "I'm just so bored by it all. The symbols. The keys, the kuffiyehs -- I mean, is this all we have? Olive trees? Is this really all we have?"
But this isn't just a political novel, or a novel about art. Sonia's relationship with her sister is the heart of the novel and they struggle to relate to each other. Sonia travels on a British passport, Haneen on an Israeli as she commutes to Tel Aviv, and the gulf between them sometimes seems like it can't be traversed, due to the difference between Sonia's life in London and Haneen's reality as an Arab Israeli -- "It also distressed me to notice that the reality of this kind of news, or at least my sense of its reality, had been increased by geographic closeness. It felt like a throwback to the intifada summers of our adolescence." Nevertheless, in striking interludes they draw closer together, despite "the long frail story of our sisterhood, and all the petty crimes committed, the crosshatching of intention and advantage and betrayal."
I also want to commend Hammad's prose style. It takes exemplary command of style to be able to switch from prose to entire chapters written in stageplay format, both of which add to the scenes they contain and feel completely natural. This is a virtuoso performance for a novel, and I can't recommend it enough.