A review by kylegarvey
What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

adventurous dark medium-paced

3.0

 

El Akkad, who wrote American War, made his next novel, What Strange Paradise, about similar, left-leaning sympathies. Migrant weirdness, refugee angst, 21st-century hell as it is. I suppose a lot of things are written about a lot of authors by a lot of critics, and that's all well and good if you like cacophony and/or limp, slapping arguments, etc.; but I must remark that El Akkad seems to write just the minimalist, clipped, pseudo-profound, leftist prose I enjoy dipping into occasionally. 

 

Sorry if that's a liäbility soon enough for him -- like if, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had mentioned liking Hans Hotter and then later Hotter had to be like 'Oy vey, Hitler again, ok, can't control who your fans are, '. El Akkad sort of begins "all the shipwrecks of the previous year are a single shipwreck, all the bodies a single body" (12). I'm that myself also, aren't I (unfortunately), 'a single body', so I relate? 

 

We can be very weary about the whole situation ("Loud Uncle once said none of this was real, borders being a European disease. In the flint beyond the windows there were no markers of where one territory ended and the other began—only the sea which was the sky and the sky which was the land and the land which, whomever it belonged to, was not his" (22)) but also strikingly wise ("The passengers in Kamal’s immediate vicinity turned to look at the bare blue glow emanating from the screen. They observed it the way a doll maker might observe a creation come to life" (185). 

 

But also, activism from regular people (like me?) might not 'matter', ultimately? "His father once told him that every man is nothing more or less than the demands he makes of the world, and that the more a man demands of the world, the bigger the magnitude of his success or failure in life. This, his father said, is what matters—the size of the asking" (205). And then also "You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage, their fraudulent grief. They will march the streets on your behalf, they will write to politicians on your behalf…" (223). 

 

Just me, where I'm at? Hate to selfishly, immodestly gather up what's not mine, but I'll have to if I have to. Or it can wrap its story up by returning to the image that opened it, but from a pronounced skew, morbid: "I remember the bodies started washing up on the shore and the municipality brought them here first. They were laid out side by side, maybe on these same tables. It was an ugly thing to see, all of them together like that. The dead deserve their space" (220).