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A review by tracyjwd
No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa
5.0
I'm back. :P
I bought this book a week before Palestine erupted into violence and bloodshed, so it was really hard to keep going back to this novel set in 70s-80s Syria (there is no specification but one guesses based on the author's subtle descriptions of historical figures and events).
Let me start by saying this book is neither linear nor clear. What this means is that we don't know our narrator that well; this is a book about a family that loses everything they have to the Assad regime and its political spawns, and how a society can unravel itself if enough fear and distrust are manufactured in the souls of each individual. This book switches between decades and ages. It travels through Dubai and Paris and Aleppo and the village of Midan Akbas. There are only six characters we reliably get to know. Every time I picked up this book it felt like I was plunging my hand into the ground and tapping out from the world I'm living in because it was so deep and delicate in the way it portrayed the "parallel lives" people lead when living under a dictatorship.
Some parts did read like unnecessary porn/eroticism to bolster Sawsan's image as the "irrepressible" daughter, and we definitely spent more pages with her than I would have liked (I wanted to know more about Rashid and Nizar, the musicians) but I still enjoyed her arch as a woman constantly trying to reinvent and find herself in the midst of a power-hungry and morally depraved society.
Honestly - this is just such a heavy book that I can't even recount a third of it without producing an essay. But I think it is essential reading for those who want to know more about the reality of Syria under the Assads, which also offers a fictional perspective of what may have instigated the Syrian Civil War. I honestly don't know if I can shake off this family anytime soon because, in just 215 pages, I felt like I intimately got to know each of them (my favorite being Nizar, their uncle). It also goes without saying that the fact that this book took me 6 weeks to finish given the length of it is a reflection of Khalifa's eloquent, but dense, prose. Hats off to the translator.
I bought this book a week before Palestine erupted into violence and bloodshed, so it was really hard to keep going back to this novel set in 70s-80s Syria (there is no specification but one guesses based on the author's subtle descriptions of historical figures and events).
Let me start by saying this book is neither linear nor clear. What this means is that we don't know our narrator that well; this is a book about a family that loses everything they have to the Assad regime and its political spawns, and how a society can unravel itself if enough fear and distrust are manufactured in the souls of each individual. This book switches between decades and ages. It travels through Dubai and Paris and Aleppo and the village of Midan Akbas. There are only six characters we reliably get to know. Every time I picked up this book it felt like I was plunging my hand into the ground and tapping out from the world I'm living in because it was so deep and delicate in the way it portrayed the "parallel lives" people lead when living under a dictatorship.
Some parts did read like unnecessary porn/eroticism to bolster Sawsan's image as the "irrepressible" daughter, and we definitely spent more pages with her than I would have liked (I wanted to know more about Rashid and Nizar, the musicians) but I still enjoyed her arch as a woman constantly trying to reinvent and find herself in the midst of a power-hungry and morally depraved society.
Honestly - this is just such a heavy book that I can't even recount a third of it without producing an essay. But I think it is essential reading for those who want to know more about the reality of Syria under the Assads, which also offers a fictional perspective of what may have instigated the Syrian Civil War. I honestly don't know if I can shake off this family anytime soon because, in just 215 pages, I felt like I intimately got to know each of them (my favorite being Nizar, their uncle). It also goes without saying that the fact that this book took me 6 weeks to finish given the length of it is a reflection of Khalifa's eloquent, but dense, prose. Hats off to the translator.