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kplab81 's review for:
The Thirty Names of Night
by Zeyn Joukhadar
This book is beautiful - beautifully written, filled with gorgeous imagery and memorable, exceptional characters. It is told in two parts - one from Joukhadar's nameless narrator who is coping with the grief of his mother's death and trying to navigate a world in which he has not yet fully come into his identity as a trans-male. He lovingly tends to his grandmother and her plants, cat, and apartment - often sharing observations and insights with the image of his mother's ghost. He is an artist but has felt creatively barren since his mother's death. He's estranged from his sister, best friend (and crush), and the larger Syrian community in New York - primarily because of the boundaries placed between his identity and society at large. The narrator, following in his mother's footsteps, explores the ruins of the few remaining buildings of Little Syria hoping for inspiration and answers to his loss. In the process, he discovers a journal hidden in the walls of a soon-to-be-demolished community house that belongs to a legendary Syrian artist known only as Laila Z.
The second part of the story comes from Laila Z - once a renowned Syrian artist capturing the hope, loss, grief, and joy of her immigrant community through her painting who disappeared entirely from public life (and from the Syrian community) leaving many to question what happened to her and where she went. Through the journals, we learn about the missing chapters of Laila's life: the love she felt for another woman while still in Syria, the pain of their separation and her experience with immigration, and the life Laila built in the United States - living out half-truths and expressing her full self through her elaborate prints of different bird species.
The through-line of this story is the narrator's quest to prove that his mother (an avid orinthologist in addition to an activist for the Syrian community) observed a rare species of bird that was only captured by two other people - an African American orinthologist in the early 20th century and Laila Z. This quest gradually breaks the narrator's fog of loneliness and isolation and brings him back into community. As he connects the dots between the three parties involved, he finds his own sense of fullness and renames himself Nadir (Arabic for rare).
Joukhadar beautifully ties together so many threads - the grief of losing one's identity, family, community, homeland; the joy of finding your people and regaining a sense of home; the preciousness of intellectual curiosity and exploration; the stories told through art and all forms of artistic expression. This was just a really beautiful book.
The second part of the story comes from Laila Z - once a renowned Syrian artist capturing the hope, loss, grief, and joy of her immigrant community through her painting who disappeared entirely from public life (and from the Syrian community) leaving many to question what happened to her and where she went. Through the journals, we learn about the missing chapters of Laila's life: the love she felt for another woman while still in Syria, the pain of their separation and her experience with immigration, and the life Laila built in the United States - living out half-truths and expressing her full self through her elaborate prints of different bird species.
The through-line of this story is the narrator's quest to prove that his mother (an avid orinthologist in addition to an activist for the Syrian community) observed a rare species of bird that was only captured by two other people - an African American orinthologist in the early 20th century and Laila Z. This quest gradually breaks the narrator's fog of loneliness and isolation and brings him back into community. As he connects the dots between the three parties involved, he finds his own sense of fullness and renames himself Nadir (Arabic for rare).
Joukhadar beautifully ties together so many threads - the grief of losing one's identity, family, community, homeland; the joy of finding your people and regaining a sense of home; the preciousness of intellectual curiosity and exploration; the stories told through art and all forms of artistic expression. This was just a really beautiful book.